A lush and intelligent opener for a topical eco-fantasy series.
Nature and science in a vivid Cape Cod setting create layers of meaning as 13-year-old Cara and her brothers confront the puzzle of their mother’s disappearance.
Mom vanished two months ago, and summer’s ending. While swimming in the ocean, Cara spots a sea otter—but sea otters don’t belong on Atlantic beaches. Cara reaches out her fingertips, and the otter streams words into Cara’s mind: “TAKE CARE OF THEM FOR ME.” The next morning, on a bayside beach (across the Cape from the ocean beach), she sees the otter again—or another one—and Cara’s dog picks up a piece of driftwood inscribed “CARA. CONSULT THE LEATHERBACK.” Ten-year-old brother Jax, a genius with odd ESP gifts, communes with the aquarium’s leatherback turtle; 16-year-old brother Max, a skeptic, needs coaxing but joins the mission too. A man stalks them, water flowing continuously out of his face; he arrives, horribly, through faucets and lawn sprinklers. In a stunning and luminescent scene, Cara and Jax confront the Pouring Man on the ocean floor. Their quest has three levels: a personal level about their missing mother, an ecological level about ocean acidification and an epic level about good and evil that the kids don’t understand yet. Millet’s prose is lyrically evocative (“the rhythmic scoop and splash of their paddles”).
A lush and intelligent opener for a topical eco-fantasy series. (Fantasy. 9-13)Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-931520-71-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Big Mouth House
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
Whit and Wisty Allgood, sibling magic-users with amazingly unreliable powers, return to fight with their utterly expendable teen comrades against The One Who Is The One, dread master of the New Order, who hates the young and those with imagination (Witch & Wizard, 2009). Whit and Wisty carry out a mission and are betrayed. They are captured and escape. They run and are captured again. They try to save their parents (for naught), but spooky unknown forces save the teens who (obviously) live to fight again in the upcoming sequel. Fiction brand Patterson returns with a new co-author, Rust, to pick up the story of the Allgoods, and what they offer is more nonsensical, inconsistent blather. There are no characters that even rise to the level of stereotypes and no genuine emotions in this embarrassing attempt at a “fantasy” series that insults both genre and audience at every turn. At best, it reads like a Carol Burnett Sci-Fi sketch with all of the mugging and none of the laughs. A new low in children’s publishing. (Fantasy. 9-12)
Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-316-03625-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
This enthusiastic but clichéd series opener strings trope after trope on a thread of purple prose. On their 13th birthday, Diello and Cynthe impatiently await the manifestation of their magical gifts. These twins are Faelin, which means half Fae (on Mamee’s side) and half human (on Pa’s), and they have “coppery, green-flecked eyes” (natch). On an errand, the twins face not just the usual Faelin-hating prejudice but real danger; then they meet a talking golden wolf and return home to find their parents murdered, the farm sacked and old family secrets emerging. A hidden (and broken) sword, a gift of Sight, an endangered younger sister and a beckoning quest complete the picture. Earthy farm details (“We needed the rain, but it hit too hard. Mind that you lift the seedlings off the mud”) mix awkwardly with the glistening stuff of Fae (“When [Mamee] was very happy, she sometimes let her glamour appear, turning her into a glittering creature of silvery sparkles, her skin like snow, her lashes like tiny crystals”). The author tries to paint a unique world with slight alterations of recognizable English words (trees are “walner,” “chesternut” and “willuth”), but the exposition is clumsy, and momentum is weakened by overexplanation (“Amalina screamed. A cry of sheer terror”). It's not subtle, but it will carry along some readers on the prose’s pure eagerness. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7614-5828-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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