A disappointing (probable) end to a series that should have been better, given its promising concept.
In the concluding Sixty-Eight Rooms adventure, Ruthie and Jack finally recognize the enormous power and great danger that magic can bring.
In the past, shrinking down and exploring the miniature Thorne Rooms was thrilling. Who wouldn’t want to explore more? But Ruthie and Jack don’t know the full extent of the magic. A letter they find from Narcissa Thorne, the woman who created the Thorne Rooms, puts everything into perspective. The warning of danger becomes all too real. Cycling through more time-travel excursions than ever before—some only a scant five pages long and some with no apparent purpose to the narrative—Ruthie and Jack find themselves in multiple cities of 18th-century England, in the middle of the Boxer Rebellion in China and, through a surprising portal, at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York City. Along the way they learn more rules of time travel and realize that it is possible to get stuck in a time period with no way of return. Multiple adventures and seemingly tense moments should spark the pace, but the story plods along, never reaching its full potential. (By book’s end, the magic may need to be shut off, but the opportunity to reignite it still exists. Malone is keeping options open.)
A disappointing (probable) end to a series that should have been better, given its promising concept. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-97721-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014
It’s fine, but it doesn’t live up to its potential as a STEM-plus-caper adventure.
This thriller reads like Miss Congeniality meets Kingsman, starring Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and Anishinaabe-kwe water protector Autumn Peltier…kind of.
Puerto Rican–born, Brooklyn-raised Sara isn’t expecting much from her court-appointed lawyer—she has no reason to put faith in the system that put her in jail after she hacked into the city’s computers to expose her foster parents as abusive frauds. But with juvie her only other prospect, Sara takes a leap and agrees to a wild proposition: She’ll join Britain’s MI6 as a kid operative. When she arrives at the covert facility in Scotland, she meets the other kids the MI6 agent, a white Englishman affectionately called Mother, has taken in—all of them, like Sara, have highly developed skills in logic, puzzles, sneakiness, and other useful spy tactics. Mother has a mission for them; he’s taking them to Paris to a competition for youth environmental innovation, where their job is to perform just well enough to make it into the top 10 so they can protect the eccentric billionaire sponsor of the contest from an imminent threat. It’s a fun romp with timely but superficial things to say about environmental activism, though the recruitment process and messy organization stretches the imagination even with a hardy suspension of disbelief. For a spy story, it’s surprisingly interior focused rather than action packed. The cast is technically diverse in ethnic background, but this has next to no influence on the characters.
It’s fine, but it doesn’t live up to its potential as a STEM-plus-caper adventure. (Thriller. 8-12)Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5344-1491-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
Wholesome shading to bland, but well-stocked with exotic creatures and locales, plus an agreeable cast headed by a child...
A San Diego preteen learns that she’s an elf, with a place in magic school if she moves to the elves’ hidden realm.
Having felt like an outsider since a knock on the head at age 5 left her able to read minds, Sophie is thrilled when hunky teen stranger Fitz convinces her that she’s not human at all and transports her to the land of Lumenaria, where the ageless elves live. Taken in by a loving couple who run a sanctuary for extinct and mythical animals, Sophie quickly gathers friends and rivals at Foxfire, a distinctly Hogwarts-style school. She also uncovers both clues to her mysterious origins and hints that a rash of strangely hard-to-quench wildfires back on Earth are signs of some dark scheme at work. Though Messenger introduces several characters with inner conflicts and ambiguous agendas, Sophie herself is more simply drawn as a smart, radiant newcomer who unwillingly becomes the center of attention while developing what turn out to be uncommonly powerful magical abilities—reminiscent of the younger Harry Potter, though lacking that streak of mischievousness that rescues Harry from seeming a little too perfect. The author puts her through a kidnapping and several close brushes with death before leaving her poised, amid hints of a higher destiny and still-anonymous enemies, for sequels.
Wholesome shading to bland, but well-stocked with exotic creatures and locales, plus an agreeable cast headed by a child who, while overly fond of screaming, rises to every challenge. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-4593-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
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