An overstuffed horror story, but one that will both warm the heart and chill the spine.
Bowler’s (And the Children Shall Lead, 2014, etc.) YA novel pits brave, resourceful special needs teenagers against a whole shelf’s worth of supernatural scares.
Alex is an unusual student. Not only is he wheelchair-bound, but, like a lot of spina bifida sufferers, he’s a remedial reader. After he’s placed in a special class with his best friend, Roy, he faces mockery from other kids at Mark Twain High—particularly the cheerleaders and jocks, who call him a “crip” and “Roller Boy.” What they don’t know is that he possesses secret powers. Specifically, he’s a “spinner” who can mind-meld with others and take away their pain by absorbing it briefly into himself. Everything changes for Alex when, on his 15th birthday, he wakes from a dream in which he sees his teacher violently murdered. Arriving at school, he discovers that his dream was prophetic—and his teacher has been replaced by a sinister substitute. In the days that follow, he confronts knife-wielding attackers, eerie talismans, homicidal cats, a talking doll, malevolent men in suits, and a Faustian femme fatale. He also receives a long-lost message from his dead mother, warning him that “some say you will be the great peacemaker, and others the great destroyer.” There occasionally seem to be too many shadowy figures lurking around and too many cross-genre borrowings for the novel to establish a steady mood. However, Bowler effectively compensates for the overgrown garden of his imagination by communicating a thoughtful, sincere empathy for kids with disabilities. “We spend way too much time in this country focusing on what we perceive to be the weaknesses of others,” he writes in a prefatory note, and in this novel, he depicts his special needs kids not as victims but as real heroes. There are few worthier goals for a novelist, and his attempt here is largely successful.
An overstuffed horror story, but one that will both warm the heart and chill the spine.Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 439
Publisher: YoungDudes Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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