A teeming, action-packed fantasy liberally laced with Venetian history, for strong readers of both sexes; a sequel awaits....
Teodora, a bookish girl with a complex destiny, joins with Renzo, a Venetian boy, to battle the city’s impending destruction.
In 1899, Teo and her adoptive, scientist parents travel from Naples to Venice for a conference focused on the city’s shockingly dire problems. Rapidly heating water has brought sharks to the lagoon; wells are bursting, and children are dying of a hushed-up plague. Teo has always felt powerfully drawn to Venice. When a mysterious tome, The Key to the Secret City, clocks her in a bookshop, she enters a parallel Venice, “between the linings.” There, the evil exile Bajamonte Tiepolo is rematerializing, assembling a blood-lusting army of mutilated soldiers to avenge the city that destroyed them. With the Key their helpfully morphing guidebook, Teo and Renzo assist a community of protective mermaids and “The Gray Lady,” a librarian-turned–spell-tattooed cat, racing against Tiepolo’s dark triumph. Thickly plotted and encrusted with historical characters and fantastic elements (invisibility, an almanac of spells, transmogrifying statuary), Venetian transplant Lovric’s first effort for children is one grisly, bristling ride. A map, historical notes and a section entitled “What is true, and what’s made up?” shed light on the complicated allegory, but fantasy-devouring kids might well prefer the fast-paced horror to the historicity.
A teeming, action-packed fantasy liberally laced with Venetian history, for strong readers of both sexes; a sequel awaits. (Fantasy. 11-14)Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-385-73999-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
The author of Bran Hambric: The Fairfield Curse (2009) dishes up an equally maladroit sequel featuring the same sort of nonsensical plot, clumsy satirical elements and ham-fisted writing. Tucking in lines like, “It knew his name, which was enough to send terror through his skin,” and, “the creature leapt forward, striking his finger with her teeth,” Nation sends his young wizard-in-training on a rescue mission after a mysterious Key left him by his dead mother explodes with magic one random night and sucks the soul of his best friend/main squeeze Astara into a trap (her corpse conveniently disappears from its buried coffin some time later). Joined along the way by his previously unknown father and a Tinkerbell-style vampire fairy with obscure loyalties and motives, Bran eventually finds and destroys the trap (and the Key—supposedly, that is) in the sort of running battle with the mage who killed his mother that pauses while he dives into a lake to rescue the miraculously alive Astara and ends with everyone pretty much back where they started, poised for the next episode. Not a stand-alone, or, for that matter, a stand-at-all. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4022-4059-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Further developing the credibility-stretching premise of Dormia (2009)—that the narcoleptic residents of a secret country are more active when asleep than awake—this sequel carries heavy-lidded half-Dormian Alfonso on a circuitous route from the catacombs of Paris to the icy Urals in pursuit both of his father and an evil 600-year-old hemophiliac superwarrior. Along with folding in many flashbacks and references to the previous episode, the authors strew the plotscape with mysterious magic boxes and balls, giant “snow snakes” and huge trees that forcibly put Alfonso to sleep any time the plot needs him to do something he normally wouldn’t or couldn’t. A point of view that freely switches among characters drains the dramatic tension—Alfonso’s long-missing father, for instance, suddenly shows up in his own subplot halfway through. Needed gear is always conveniently at hand, and much of the action either takes place offstage or is described like this: “…at the moment that the dagger pricked Alfonso’s shirt, he moved his torso so forcefully and suddenly that the man fell to the floor.” Fantasy fans can find better with their eyes closed. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-547-48037-4
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
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