A hybrid of humor and horror that shows young readers both real fear and real friendship.
A middle school bomb-shelter clubhouse becomes ground zero for the craziest last day of school ever.
The self-declared “worst” kid in his gifted circle of friends—the one with seemingly no talent for anything except getting into trouble—has spent his final year at Jerome Marco K-8 collecting disaster stories with his Team Bomb Shelter crew: martial arts cousin Adam, science whiz Rover, statistics prodigy Sean, wheelchair-using brainy beauty Helen, bighearted athlete Charlie, and artist Jesús. Barn dances, snow days, gymnasium catastrophes, and stink-bomb wars have already earned this ragtag group a reputation for turning ordinary mishaps into legend. But when a bureaucratic snafu forces the graduating eighth graders back for one unwanted extra day of school, what should have been just another goofy footnote to their “worst” collection instead turns into the single most terrifying afternoon of their lives: An armed intruder brings the school to a standstill. Trapped, scattered, and cut off from help, each member of the friend group has to draw on the skill that makes them unique to survive an ordeal that no lesson has ever prepared them for. Binder’s third book in the Team Bomb Shelter series is a genuine tonal high-wire act that mostly works. The narrator’s motor-mouthed, wisecracking voice carries the early comic chapters with real charm, and the ensemble’s distinct personalities (the strategist, the scientist, the artist, the empath) pay off cleverly once the crisis hits. Each kid’s standout quirk becomes a genuine asset rather than a punchline. The shift from slapstick to suspense is handled with more care than the premise might suggest, never lingering on graphic violence, and the aftermath makes room for grief, guilt, and healing without turning preachy. However, the earlier episodic chapters, while funny, sometimes meander long enough to blunt the urgency once the main event arrives, and some jokes lean on now-familiar sitcom-kid archetypes.
A hybrid of humor and horror that shows young readers both real fear and real friendship.Pub Date: tomorrow
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel.
Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment.
Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. George and Harold link up in kindergarten to reduce a quartet of vicious bullies to giggling insanity with a relentless series of pranks involving shaving cream, spiders, effeminate spoof text messages and friendship bracelets. Pilkey tucks both topical jokes and bathroom humor into the cartoon art, and ups the narrative’s lexical ante with terms like “pharmaceuticals” and “theatrical flair.” Unfortunately, the bullies’ sad fates force Krupp to resign, so he’s not around to save the Earth from being destroyed later on by Talking Toilets and other invaders…
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-17534-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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