Haber turns Stuart Little inside out for an inventive, tongue-in-cheek children’s debut. Ten years old and three inches high, Hercules escapes cats and other dangers, real or imagined, by going through a mouse hole, and discovers beneath his apartment floor an entire tiny town, lit by magically glowing cheese and populated by peaceful, generous, live-for-the-moment mice. Ever studious (“ . . . he wanted to be safe at home, curled up on the pages of a good book”), Hercules soon learns from the town chronicles that the mice are massacred at regular intervals by savage rats; searching for a way to break this ugly cycle without causing more killing takes him from the dusty ruins of former mouse towns to the hidden realm of small but powerful sorceresses. With help from mouse and human allies, he holds off the unspeakably brutal rats long enough for the mice to escape, then returns, now magically full-sized, to his own world. A quirky but engaging disquisition on number systems (most mice can’t count past three) closes this witty, well-told beneath-the-floorboards adventure. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-525-47119-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
After 16 years of mostly mysteries for adults, Langton resurrects the Concord cast of Fragile Flag (1984) and its predecessors for a charming, if patchwork, time-travel tale. The expensive new bike that Eddy receives for his birthday is stolen, then replaced by an old-fashioned one from his royal Indian uncle. Meanwhile, local bank president Ralph Q. Preek has ordered Uncle Freddy and Aunt Alex to produce a vanished deed or vacate their rambling old house, and Eddy's older sister Eleanor is having fantods waiting for an in-crowd party invitation that never arrives. Once Eddy discovers that the old bicycle is a time machine, he, Eleanor, and his hamfisted friend Oliver each hare off into the past on ill-conceived adventures. Eleanor, for instance, wheels back to 1938 in a vain effort to save the life of movie star Derek Alabaster. Eddy, pushing off for Julius Caesar's time, ends up on a deserted beach after realizing too late that ancient Rome is far from Massachusetts in space as well as time. These parallel plot lines either dovetail in hyperconvenient fashion—a piece of paper that Eleanor just happens to pick up from the ground in 1938 turns out to be the missing deed—or trail away unresolved, creating a succession of loosely linked episodes but no unified story. Still, the major characters are easy to like (or, in Preek's case, despise), and the magical events are folded into the fabric of everyday life so neatly that they seem to belong there. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: June 30, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-028437-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An overstuffed tale that will nevertheless wriggle its way into readers’ affections, starring an out-crowd sixth grader and a tiny, worm-like creature who can make anything vanish by eating the word for it. Hatchling Fip’s taste for the printed word may be judged unacceptably “runtly and weakish” by his earthworm clan, but when he munches on an empty thumbtack box, loose papers suddenly avalanche from bulletin boards nationwide. Fip doesn’t stop there; unhappily on her way to being dubbed a SLUG (Sorry Loser Under Ground) by the classroom coterie MPOOE (Most Powerful Ones On Earth), Lerner Chanse spots him sampling an article about a newly discovered star. Learning later that the star has vanished from the skies, she confirms her suspicion by nudging him onto the school lunch menu (no more spinach soufflé—anywhere, ever again). Has Lerner found the way to acceptance—or to universal disaster? Both, as it turns out, though ensuing misadventures ranging from the near-catastrophic—as when Fip nearly eats the word “oxygen” out of her science homework—to the hilarious teach her that her little buddy’s ability is definitely nothing to trifle with. In the end, the universe is saved when a clever bookworm entices Fip to gobble down the words “Fip’s magic.” To drive home the point that actions can have unintended, far-reaching repercussions, Amato trucks in a sackful of side plots, including one wildly tangential tale involving a ruthless businessman who finally gets proper comeuppance for using thumbtacks, manufactured by captive children, to train attack dogs. Several stories bundled together, this amiable cautionary tale, often reminiscent of Clifton Fadiman’s Wally the Wordworm or Mary Haynes’s more melodramatic Wordchanger , makes a promising, if undisciplined, debut. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: June 15, 2000
ISBN: 0-8234-1468-X
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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