A feisty circus girl and two alien boys embark on a perilous quest to save a failing city in this fantastical futurist adventure. Proud she’s a “true-born Maddigan,” 12-year-old Garland performs magic tricks and walks the tightrope in Maddigan’s Fantasia, her family’s traveling circus that criss-crosses the “nowhere” to entertain leftover people in leftover places following generations of cataclysmic poisonings, wars and plagues. When Garland’s father is killed by marauding Road Rats, she and her mother Maddie know Fantasia must move on since they are on a mission to find a new solar converter to supply power to Solis, the only surviving city. Then 15-year-old Timon and 11-year-old Eden appear with their baby sister, claiming to have traveled back in time fleeing from Nennog, their power-mad guardian. They join Fantasia’s odyssey through a hostile landscape, shadowed by Nennog’s assassin flunkies who repeatedly attempt to capture the boys and a mysterious talisman. As Garland confronts one obstacle after another, she remains true to her Maddigan roots while trying to sort out the mysterious Timon and Eden. An intense time-travel tale packed with Mahy’s usual repertoire of memorable tricksters, magical happenings and ominous undertones. (Fantasy. 10-16)
Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-4169-1812-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2007
Wrought with admirable skill—the emptiness and menace underlying this Utopia emerge step by inexorable step: a richly...
In a radical departure from her realistic fiction and comic chronicles of Anastasia, Lowry creates a chilling, tightly controlled future society where all controversy, pain, and choice have been expunged, each childhood year has its privileges and responsibilities, and family members are selected for compatibility.
As Jonas approaches the "Ceremony of Twelve," he wonders what his adult "Assignment" will be. Father, a "Nurturer," cares for "newchildren"; Mother works in the "Department of Justice"; but Jonas's admitted talents suggest no particular calling. In the event, he is named "Receiver," to replace an Elder with a unique function: holding the community's memories—painful, troubling, or prone to lead (like love) to disorder; the Elder ("The Giver") now begins to transfer these memories to Jonas. The process is deeply disturbing; for the first time, Jonas learns about ordinary things like color, the sun, snow, and mountains, as well as love, war, and death: the ceremony known as "release" is revealed to be murder. Horrified, Jonas plots escape to "Elsewhere," a step he believes will return the memories to all the people, but his timing is upset by a decision to release a newchild he has come to love. Ill-equipped, Jonas sets out with the baby on a desperate journey whose enigmatic conclusion resonates with allegory: Jonas may be a Christ figure, but the contrasts here with Christian symbols are also intriguing.
Wrought with admirable skill—the emptiness and menace underlying this Utopia emerge step by inexorable step: a richly provocative novel. (Fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 978-0-395-64566-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
The wish-fulfilling title and sun-washed, catalog-beautiful teens on the cover will be enticing for girls looking for a...
Han’s leisurely paced, somewhat somber narrative revisits several beach-house summers in flashback through the eyes of now 15-year-old Isabel, known to all as Belly.
Belly measures her growing self by these summers and by her lifelong relationship with the older boys, her brother and her mother’s best friend’s two sons. Belly’s dawning awareness of her sexuality and that of the boys is a strong theme, as is the sense of summer as a separate and reflective time and place: Readers get glimpses of kisses on the beach, her best friend’s flirtations during one summer’s visit, a first date. In the background the two mothers renew their friendship each year, and Lauren, Belly’s mother, provides support for her friend—if not, unfortunately, for the children—in Susannah’s losing battle with breast cancer. Besides the mostly off-stage issue of a parent’s severe illness there’s not much here to challenge most readers—driving, beer-drinking, divorce, a moment of surprise at the mothers smoking medicinal pot together.
The wish-fulfilling title and sun-washed, catalog-beautiful teens on the cover will be enticing for girls looking for a diversion. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4169-6823-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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