A creative but disjointed tale of magic and self-discovery.
In Peers’ middle-grade fantasy novel, a preteen girl experiences life without a cell phone or internet connection and discovers a world of magic.
Eleven-year-old Emily Webster loves her phone. Like most kids her age, she spends her days (and nights) texting and playing games with her friends—even in school, where cellphones aren’t allowed. Emily is a good student, but her cellphone usage is starting to cause her problems: She oversleeps, forgets her homework at home, and doesn’t tidy up her bedroom. Her mother, Heather, also doesn’t like that her husband, Sam (Emily’s father), works long hours at his tech job. The family receives a magazine from Star Realty featuring an old farmhouse with a barn on the cover, and they buy the property after Heather convinces Sam to take a sabbatical; they all move to middle-of-nowhere Kansas to live in the farmhouse for a year, which has no cell reception or internet connection. Emily, unlike her parents, isn’t excited about the sudden, drastic change, and she has no way to stay in touch with her friends. Then, one night, a mystical being called a Star Lady beams into her room, bearing a gift: a Dream Pillow that will show her how to find everything she's looking for—even if she doesn’t consciously know what she needs. Over the course of this novel for young readers, Peers offers an imaginative and intriguing tale in which Emily and her family members begin to understand the magical qualities of an existence that doesn’t rely on modern technology. However, the repetitive, overly explanatory prose tends to drag the narrative down, and its frequent and sudden perspective changes make it feel unfocused and hard to follow. Readers may also be put off by a few culturally insensitive bits of dialogue (“Forget the cheap gypsy tricks”; “Crappy Hawaiian songs”).
A creative but disjointed tale of magic and self-discovery.Pub Date: Jan. 14, 2025
ISBN: 9780998212937
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Cherry Wood Productions
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
An epic fantasy with timeless themes and unforgettable characters.
Two young people save the world and all the magic in it in this series opener.
When tall, dark-haired, white-skinned Christopher Forrester goes to stay with his grandfather in Scotland, he ventures to the top of a forbidden hill and discovers astonishing magical creatures. His grandfather explains that Christopher’s family are guardians of the “way through” to the Archipelago, where the Glimourie Tree grows—the source of glimourie, or the world’s magic. Black-haired, olive-skinned Mal Arvorian, a girl from the Archipelago, is being pursued by a murderer, and she asks Christopher for help, launching them both on a wild, dangerous journey to discover why the glimourie is disappearing and how to stop it. Together with a part-nereid woman, a ratatoska, a dragon, and a Berserker, they face an odyssey of dangerous tasks to find the Immortal, the only one who can reverse the draining of magic. Like Lyra and Will from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Mal and Christopher sacrifice their innocence for experience, meeting every challenge with depthless courage until they finally reach the maze at the heart of it all. Rundell throws myriad obstacles in her characters’ way, but she gives them tools both tangible (a casapasaran, which always points the way home, and the glamry blade, which cuts through anything) and intangible (the desire “to protect something worth protecting” and an “insistence that the world is worth loving”). Final art not seen.
An epic fantasy with timeless themes and unforgettable characters. (map, bestiary) (Fantasy. 10-16)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593809860
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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