Readers looking for a story involving horses, magic, or a bit of Cuban history will do better looking elsewhere.
A young girl’s greatest fear is the loneliness of horselessness.
The story starts as the Spanish-American War ends. Estrellita is a young girl afflicted by rickets due to the lack of sunshine and proper nutrition experienced during the war when she and her mother were forced to remain hidden in a cave. Now out of the cave and in the city, Estrellita meets a man who rewards her imaginative storytelling by allowing her to groom his horses, and she eventually learns to ride. When a colt is born and becomes hers, a bond is forged between the two. Eventually Estrellita, the horse—Lucero, or Morning Star—and a large group of Cuban children end up at a progressive theosophist school in California. Horse and rider are separated, and by the time they reunite, the horse has grown wings and can fly. Engle combines a too-large number of intriguing though disparate elements as she works from beginning to unsatisfying ending: Cuban lore, alternative education, physical disabilities, a love of horses, magical flights in the air and underwater, mistrust, bullying, anger, bewilderment, and punishment. The resulting story is one that rambles more than it makes sense. The Spanish translation runs in parallel to the English text on facing pages; though for the most part it’s correct, it is at times too wordy, leading to awkwardness.
Readers looking for a story involving horses, magic, or a bit of Cuban history will do better looking elsewhere. (author’s note) (Historical verse novel. 10-13)Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943050-25-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Horizon Bound
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
A deft mix of chills and chuckles, not quite as sideways as Wayside School but in the same district.
A fifth-grader struggles to fit in after he and his recently widowed mother move to a decidedly oddball new town.
As if the seemingly infinite pier, the lighthouse in the middle of town, and the beach teeming with enigmatic cats aren’t strange enough, Davy Jones discovers that his school locker has been relocated to the deep end of the swimming pool, his lunchtime fries are delivered by a “spudzooka,” and no one seems to be able to get his name right. On the other hand, his classmates welcome him, and in next to no time he’s breaking into an abandoned arcade to play pinball against a ghost, helping track down a pet pig gone missing on Gravity Maintenance Day, and like adventures that, often as not, take sinister swerves before edging back to the merely peculiar. Point-of-view duties pass freely from character to character, and chapters are punctuated with extracts from the Topsea School Gazette (“Today’s Seaweed Level: Medium-high and feisty”), bulletins on such topics as the safe handling of rubber ducks, and background notes on, for instance, the five local seasons, giving the narrative a pleasantly loose-jointed feel. Davy presents as white, but several other central cast members are specifically described as dark- or light-skinned and are so depicted in the frequent line drawings; one has two moms.
A deft mix of chills and chuckles, not quite as sideways as Wayside School but in the same district. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-368-00005-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Feb. 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
A patchy tale flickering repeatedly from light to dark and back.
Alex’s ability to talk with ghosts puts him in famous company when he and his mom move to Hannibal, Missouri.
Alex, 13, is driven by bitter determination to keep his lifelong ability secret, since it’s already led to a diagnosis of schizophrenia that drove his parents apart and cost his mother a decent job, but it’s not easy. For one thing, his new friend, Bones, is a positively obsessed amateur ghost hunter, and for another, ghosts just won’t leave him alone no matter how rudely he treats them. Notable among the latter is Mark Twain himself, as acerbic and wily as he was in life, who is on the verge of involuntarily degenerating into a raging poltergeist unless Alex can find the unspecified, titular treasure. Alex’s search takes him through Clemens’ writings and tragic private life as well as many of the town’s related attractions on the way to a fiery climax in the public library. Meanwhile, Alex has an apotheosis of his own, deciding that lying to conceal his ability and his unhappy past isn’t worth the sacrifice of a valued friendship. Conveniently for the plot’s needs, Clemens and other ghosts can interact with the physical world at will. Wolfe parlays Alex’s ingrained inability to ignore ectoplasmic accosters into some amusing cross-conversations that help lighten his protagonist’s hard inner tests. The cast, living and otherwise, presents as white.
A patchy tale flickering repeatedly from light to dark and back. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: June 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-940924-29-8
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Dreaming Robot
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
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