Likely, like its predecessor, to be a fixture on bestseller lists—but not for its imaginative or literary qualities.
Ominous portents in Auradon send the offspring of four Disney villains home—to discover that their evil parents have disappeared.
De la Cruz picks up the plotline roughly where it left off at the end of the 2015 TV film Descendants. Spurred by mysteriously delivered threats and also the discovery of an Anti-Heroes Club posting to a surreptitious Dark Web, Mal, Evie, Jay, and Carlos (more-or-less reformed children of, respectively, Maleficent, Snow White’s Evil Queen, Jafar, and Cruella de Vil) steal away from Auradon Prep’s Castlecoming dance to check out their old haunts in the villains’ island enclave. From there, events dissolve into a confused tangle. After much buildup, the supposedly hostile club turns out to be composed of worshipful groupies (who explain at length how “anti-heroes” are actually cool). A message that the vanished ’rents have collected talismans that will magnify their evil powers sends the four teens in pursuit—to encounter a monster with “huge fanged teeth” and find, confusingly, that the talismans are somehow still in place and ready to be gathered up. A familiar purple dragon laying waste to Camelot’s suburbs turns out, anticlimactically, not to be Maleficent but another, much more easily overcome shape-changer. Even the characters know all this is phoned in: “What are we going to do,” says Carlos, “when they tell us what their evil plan is?” The continued absence of the grown-up baddies, plus a spate of earthquakes and violent weather, remains to be resolved in future sequels.
Likely, like its predecessor, to be a fixture on bestseller lists—but not for its imaginative or literary qualities. (Fantasy. 10-13)Pub Date: May 24, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4847-5071-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Lovers of bloody fantasy epics will be glad to have another.
An unnamed warrior-child in training needs to defeat the inner demons that enrage her.
Twelve is an acolyte of the Hunters, a group of warriors who sever all prior ties, give up their names, and fight the darkness. Despite her prowess in battle, she’s friendless, prone to lashing out, and desperate to avoid thinking about her painful past. Her solitude ends when the Hunting Lodge is attacked by goblins—and worse. The only girl Twelve even remotely likes, the worst warrior of them all, is kidnapped, and Twelve hurls herself into the monstrous outer world to save her friend. But it seems she won’t be going alone. She’s joined by Dog, a massive stone beast, the irritable (and sometimes funny) fighter who guards the lodge. And soon they’re also joined by Five and Six, the two most hateful boys among the huntlings. At least Twelve can lean on her squirrel friend, Widge, a gift from kidnapped Seven. The northern wilds are a frozen wasteland filled with terrifying monsters, and if the young warriors are to survive they’ll have to learn to trust each other (and themselves). A few threads are left dangling for the next entry in the series. Late-discovered magic provides a deus ex machina in a quest that’s otherwise about inner knowledge and cooperation. All the human characters appear to be White.
Lovers of bloody fantasy epics will be glad to have another. (Fantasy. 10-13)Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-299671-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
This middle-grade read is heartfelt, but nostalgia that’s a bit too on the nose makes it hard to follow
Twelve-year-old aspiring astronaut Ebony-Grace Norfleet Freeman is lonely and homesick in New York.
When trouble hits her family like an asteroid, Ebony-Grace, aka Cadet E-Grace Starfleet, is forced to leave her beloved grandfather and her hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, to spend a week with her father in Harlem, New York—or as she calls it, “No Joke City.” Determined to ignore what she calls the “Sonic Boom,” New York’s hip-hop revolution in the early 1980s, Ebony-Grace rejects the people, music, and movements of Harlem, instead blasting off in her mind aboard the Mothership Uhura to save her grandfather, Capt. Fleet. Stuck, Ebony-Grace works to navigate a new frontier where she is teased and called “crazy” because of her imaginative intergalactic adventures. Ostracized as a flava-less, “plain ol’ ice cream sandwich! Chocolate on the outside, vanilla on the inside,” Ebony-Grace tries her best to be “regular and normal,” but her outer-space imaginings are the only things that keep her grounded. The design includes images that sho nuff bring the ’80s alive: comic-strip panels, inverted Star Wars scripting, and onomatopoeic graffiti-esque words. Unfortunately, these serve to interrupt an already-crowded narrative as readers hyperjump between Ebony-Grace’s imagination and the movement of life in the real world, transmitted via news reports and subway memorials.
This middle-grade read is heartfelt, but nostalgia that’s a bit too on the nose makes it hard to follow . (Historical fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-18735-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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