Young heroes both male and female rout many excellent monsters—what’s not to like? (Graphic/fantasy hybrid. 9-11)
Knights errant who cut their teeth battling dinosaurs in the previous episode take on magical mist monsters.
Fresh from the exploits chronicled in Knights Vs. Dinosaurs (2018) and on the lookout for a “proper adventure,” Sirs Erec, Bors, and Hector, the fearsome Black Knight Magdalena, and former squire in disguise Melancholy “Mel” Postlethwaite fetch up in the bleak Orkney Isles, where sorcerous Queen Morgause plans to do them in as part of a larger scheme to dethrone King Arthur. Along with several of her raffish offspring—including creepy young Mordred, who temporarily turns Sir Hector into a two-headed “bi-clops”—the doughty Band of the Terrible Lizards faces burgeoning hordes of monsters summoned out of the fog by the evil queen. Though chock-full of briskly paced action and glints of humor, this is a darker tale than its predecessor, colored more by its harsh setting and undercurrents of treachery than all the knightly feats and values on display. Phelan’s many panels and full-page drawings have an ashy, smudged look that adds to the gloomy atmosphere, and as someone who plainly has a few heavy secrets in her past, Magdalena projects a cold, austere remoteness that dims the rest of the company’s (rarer than previously) comical banter and bumbling. Still, a pleaser for fans of Gerald Morris’ Arthurian delights.
Young heroes both male and female rout many excellent monsters—what’s not to like? (Graphic/fantasy hybrid. 9-11)Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-268626-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This oblique homage to a now-creaky classic is lit by friendships, heroic feats, and exceptional art.
A long-eared young hero takes on a witch bent on trapping rare legendary creatures in a magical book.
Not so much a pastiche of E. Nesbit’s short story “Book of Beasts” as an original novel with cribbed elements, this adventuresome outing regathers and expands the animal cast of DiTerlizzi’s 2008 reworking of The Reluctant Dragon (titled Kenny & the Dragon) for a fresh challenge. As if coping with a dozen baby sisters and tending the bookshop of his questing mentor, Sir George E. Badger, aren’t hard enough, Kenny Rabbit feels abandoned by his best friend, dessert-loving dragon Grahame—who happily recognizes the supposedly mythical manticore that springs from the pages of a grimoire as an acquaintance from olden days. Avid to collect magical creatures of all sorts, the book’s owner, sinister opossum Eldritch Nesbit, tempts Kenny into an ill-considered bargain. But once he sees not only the manticore, but Grahame too snapped up, Kenny joins allies, notably his redoubtable crush Charlotte the squirrel, in a rumbustious rescue that also frees a host of unicorns and other long-vanished marvels. Aside from the odd griffin or al-mi’raj (a horned rabbit from Persian lore and an outlier in an otherwise Eurocentric cast), everyone in the lively, accomplished illustrations, from Kenny’s impossibly adorable sibs on, sports amusingly anthropomorphic dress and body language.
This oblique homage to a now-creaky classic is lit by friendships, heroic feats, and exceptional art. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4169-8316-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A-mew-sing fare for readers who sometimes feel like fraidycats themselves.
Two shelter cats take on a mysterious puss with weird powers who is terrorizing the feline community.
Hardly have timorous (and aptly named) Poop and her sophisticated buddy, Pasha, been brought home by their new “human beans” for a two-week trial than they are accosted by fiery-eyed Scaredy Cat, utterly trashing the kitchen with a click of his claws and, hissing that he’s in charge of the neighborhood, threatening that if they don’t act like proper cats—disdaining ordinary cat food and any summons (they are not dogs, after all), clawing the furniture instead of the scratching post, and showing like “cattitude”—it’ll be back to the shelter for them. Will Poop and Pasha prove to be fraidycats or flee to the cowed clowder of homeless cats hiding from the bully in the nearby woods? Nope, they are made of sterner stuff and resolutely set out to enlist feline allies in a “quest for life, liberty, and the pursuit of purrs!” Cast into a gazillion very short chapters related by furry narrators Poop and Pasha, who are helpfully depicted in portrait vignettes by Herzog at each chapter’s head, the ensuing adventures test the defiant kitties’ courage (and, in some cases, attention spans) on the way to a spooky but poignant climax set, appropriately enough as it happens, in a pet graveyard.
A-mew-sing fare for readers who sometimes feel like fraidycats themselves. (Adventure. 9-11)Pub Date: March 15, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-316-49443-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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