This earnest but uneven fantasy will appeal most to role-playing–game fans.
There’s a reason the popular role-playing game Beasts and Battlements originated in Midnight Lake, Wisconsin.
Twelve-year-old Vivian Van Tassel has extraordinary fencing skills, a short temper, a passion for Harry Potter books, and a dead mother—for which she blames herself. Moving to her mother’s hometown of Midnight Lake just exacerbates her negative feelings, as she endures bullies and nasty teachers at her new school. Still, despite insisting she doesn’t want friends, Vivian does gradually connect with four Beasts and Battlements gamers. Then, while doing a local history project, Vivian discovers unusual connections between B&B and Midnight Lake. Are the game beasts…real? She soon learns that vulturebears, leer spheres, and canimen belong to an “unholy alliance” fighting for Arborem, an ancient druid determined to eradicate humanity. Perhaps only Vivian, thanks to her mother’s special Silverthorn family heritage, can stop him. This fantasy adventure shines in Vivian’s struggle with grief and guilt and in its creatively crafted gaming elements. Following the prologue, though, active fantasy components disappear for many chapters, slowing the start, and some plot mechanisms feel contrived. As well, in our environmentally aware time, some readers might feel surprised to find a protective nature entity cast as the villain. Vivian and most human characters read White; one gamer is Black, and one has a Latine name.
This earnest but uneven fantasy will appeal most to role-playing–game fans. (Fantasy. 9-12)Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2023
ISBN: 9781665918190
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel.
Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment.
Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. George and Harold link up in kindergarten to reduce a quartet of vicious bullies to giggling insanity with a relentless series of pranks involving shaving cream, spiders, effeminate spoof text messages and friendship bracelets. Pilkey tucks both topical jokes and bathroom humor into the cartoon art, and ups the narrative’s lexical ante with terms like “pharmaceuticals” and “theatrical flair.” Unfortunately, the bullies’ sad fates force Krupp to resign, so he’s not around to save the Earth from being destroyed later on by Talking Toilets and other invaders…
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-17534-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
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