A tedious tale of a teenager who finds out that his 40-something mother has been a fugitive since the era of the Vietnam War. After nearly 15 years of abrupt moves, name changes, no telephones, and cash-only transactions, Toby has never cracked his mother's reticence about her past, nor tried very hard to find out about his father. Suddenly, clues begin falling into his lap: an old photo in the house of a suspiciously new ``old friend,'' a sheaf of not-very-well-hidden birth certificates and driver's licenses, an Internet news story about a 1970 raid on a student group supposedly plotting a bombing, found by chance while Toby researches a school report. When Toby sees his mother's face on a poster at the local sheriff's, he knows that the stakes are about to be pulled up again—but this time he opts to stay behind as she takes off for the Canadian border. Depending heavily on chance discoveries and her protagonist's strangely mild curiosity, Ryan creates neither suspense nor credibility, leaving readers to wonder how, even with the aid of a national underground network, Toby's mother fooled both her son and the authorities for so long. This sketchy mise-en-scäne, plus a cut-and-dried ending—Toby's mother reappears as he's telling his class how proud he is of her, turns herself in, and then learns that her protest group had been set up by government agents—wastes characters who often display some surprising depths. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: May 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-689-80789-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
Much rousing sturm und drang, though what’s left after the dust settles is a heap of glittering but disparate good parts...
Scott tops off his deservedly popular series with a heaping shovelful of monster attacks, heroic last stands, earthquakes and other geological events, magic-working, millennia-long schemes coming to fruition, hearts laid bare, family revelations, transformations, redemptions and happy endings (for those deserving them).
Multiple plotlines—some of which, thanks to time travel, feature the same characters and even figures killed off in previous episodes—come to simultaneous heads in a whirl of short chapters. Flamel and allies (including Prometheus and Billy the Kid) defend modern San Francisco from a motley host of mythological baddies. Meanwhile, in ancient Danu Talis (aka Atlantis), Josh and Sophie are being swept into a play to bring certain Elders to power as the city’s downtrodden “humani” population rises up behind Virginia Dare, the repentant John Dee and other Immortals and Elders. The cast never seems unwieldy despite its size, the pacing never lets up, and the individual set pieces are fine mixtures of sudden action, heroic badinage and cliffhanger cutoffs. As a whole, though, the tale collapses under its own weight as the San Francisco subplots turn out to be no more than an irrelevant sideshow, and climactic conflicts take place on an island that is somehow both a historical, physical place and a higher reality from which Earth and other “shadowrealms” are spun off.
Much rousing sturm und drang, though what’s left after the dust settles is a heap of glittering but disparate good parts rather than a cohesive whole. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-73535-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
If it were a Golden Age comic, this tale of ridiculous science, space dogs and humanoid aliens with flashlights in their hands might not be bad. Alas... Number Four is a fugitive from the planet Lorien, which is sloppily described as both "hundreds of lightyears away" and "billions of miles away." Along with eight other children and their caretakers, Number Four escaped from the Mogadorian invasion of Lorien ten years ago. Now the nine children are scattered on Earth, hiding. Luckily and fairly nonsensically, the planet's Elders cast a charm on them so they could only be killed in numerical order, but children one through three are dead, and Number Four is next. Too bad he's finally gained a friend and a girlfriend and doesn't want to run. At least his newly developing alien powers means there will be screen-ready combat and explosions. Perhaps most idiotic, "author" Pittacus Lore is a character in this fiction—but the first-person narrator is someone else entirely. Maybe this is a natural extension of lightly hidden actual author James Frey's drive to fictionalize his life, but literature it ain't. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196955-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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