Adventurous, thought-provoking, fast-paced, and subtly hilarious—in short, a delight to read.
Cantwell (My Friend Casey, 2015, etc.) offers a children’s story of a courageous mouse’s journey to Mars that’s part adventure and part political satire.
A mouse named Max has an owner, Melissa, who treats him kindly and trains him well, and in time, he becomes quite intelligent. But one day, his curiosity gets the best of him, and he escapes through the backyard fence and becomes lost in the city. He finds a group of friendly mice and soon becomes their leader, first directing them out of the dangerous city into the forest and then from the dangerous forest to Mars by balloon. But although the environment of the great red planet seems conducive to their survival, its inhabitants, unfortunately, are not. Robotic mice immediately take Max and his friends captive, and the mechanical royal family sentences them to be executed. The pretentious Princess Bling Bling, however, takes a liking to Max, and after sharing with him the history of her people on Mars, she offers to keep him alive—as her pet. But Max, concerned about his friends, tries to find a way to save them and escape the clutches of the dangerous Mars mice. The book teaches kids about the importance of caring for the environment and the danger of letting technology run one’s life. This is mainly shown through the history of the robotic mice; they were preceded by the Monkey People (symbolic of humans), who were destroyed by laziness and environmental abuse, and the Computer People (symbolic of technology), who eventually destroyed one another. The book also features unique, lovable characters and a quirky sense of humor; adults will get a kick out of Senator Blabbermouth, who keeps a hot air balloon afloat with rambling speeches full of “hot air”: “I promise you free cheese, chocolates for dessert, no taxes...blah, blah, blah.” The book also provides a secondary story about Melissa that’s brilliantly woven throughout Max’s tale. The charming illustrations effectively highlight major events and match the text’s silly tone.
Adventurous, thought-provoking, fast-paced, and subtly hilarious—in short, a delight to read.Pub Date: Dec. 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0944-0
Page Count: 108
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.
Using mystery and romance elements in a nonlinear narrative, SenLinYu’s debut is a doorstopper of a fantasy that follows a woman with missing memories as she navigates through a war-torn realm in search of herself.
Helena Marino is a talented young healer living in Paladia—the “Shining City”—who has been thrust into a brutal war against an all-powerful necromancer and his army of Undying, loyal henchmen with immortal bodies, and necrothralls, reanimated automatons. When Helena is awakened from stasis, a prisoner of the necromancer’s forces, she has no idea how long she has been incarcerated—or the status of the war. She soon finds herself a personal prisoner of Kaine Ferron, the High Necromancer’s “monster” psychopath who has sadistically killed hundreds for his master. Ordered to recover Helena’s buried memories by any means necessary, the two polar opposites—Helena and Kaine, healer and killer—end up discovering much more as they begin to understand each other through shared trauma. While necromancy is an oft-trod subject in fantasy novels, the author gives it a fresh feel—in large part because of their superb worldbuilding coupled with unforgettable imagery throughout: “[The necromancer] lay reclined upon a throne of bodies. Necrothralls, contorted and twisted together, their limbs transmuted and fused into a chair, moving in synchrony, rising and falling as they breathed in tandem, squeezing and releasing around him…[He] extended his decrepit right hand, overlarge with fingers jointed like spider legs.” Another noteworthy element is the complex dynamic between Helena and Kaine. To say that these two characters shared the gamut of intense emotions would be a vast understatement. Readers will come for the fantasy and stay for the romance.
Although the melodrama sometimes is a bit much, the superb worldbuilding and intricate plotline make this a must-read.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780593972700
Page Count: 1040
Publisher: Del Rey
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
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