Fantasy readers who love to explore will have days or weeks of entrancing material to obsess over.
A twisty app with a choose-your-own-adventure–style conceit surprises as a fully realized, memorable fantasy novel.
Nine-year-old Roland Bartholomew Dexter III lives in a home that’s part barbershop, part jail. His clothes, his bedding and even his food are made of hair, a circumstance his loving, fearful parents have never adequately explained. As Roland begins to explore his origins, he learns that his dreams, which vividly show what would have happened if he’d made other decisions during the day, may be the key to freedom for his whole family. The many short pages of the app make up a gigantic grid; the endless strands of Roland’s hair weave through it, and at any time, readers can view the map to “see” where they are in the story. Readers make choices by navigating one way or the other, and they can use the map to revisit pages. When a choice is made, pages that no longer apply are blacked out, a nod to one of the story’s themes: the destructiveness of censorship. It seems gimmicky at first, but the writing is wise and witty, even Snicket-y. Roland’s choices in the story are limited and sometimes lead to dead ends, but the story overall is clever enough to sustain any backtracking. By its final sections, when stakes are highest, the way the app balances an engaging interactive experience with a deep narrative becomes truly impressive.
Fantasy readers who love to explore will have days or weeks of entrancing material to obsess over. (Requires iPad 2 and above.) (iPad fantasy app. 9-14)Pub Date: May 4, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Darned Sock Productions
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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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
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