A grand finish to a YA trilogy that never fails to challenge audience expectations.
The final chapter in a YA fantasy trilogy about a boy who learns that he’s the prince of a magical, parallel world.
When readers left the titular hero in Peter Huddleston & the Mists of the Three Lakes (2014), he and his aunt, Queen Gillian Willowbrook, were ambushed during a parade celebrating his arrival in Galadria. The vile Knor Shadowray, his troops, and an army of flying harpies planned to slaughter the House of Willowbrook and take the Golden Realm by force. Peter escapes with the help of members of the House of Crimson and hides in an underground chamber. He’s shocked to find his mother, Patricia, there; he’d been told that she’d died in a car accident. After she explains her tragic back story, she leads him through Galadria’s labyrinthine sewers to the Great Palace, where Queen Gillian and her entourage are under siege by Shadowray forces. There, the queen decides to send Peter and her father, Henry, to recruit the Knights of the Leaf to aid them. The ancient order guards the primordial Forests of Fernell, where even the most inviting sights and smells can be deadly. If Peter and Henry survive the forest and find the knights, will the group be willing to help? For this finale, author de Leon sends his imagination into overdrive, delivering gorgeously elaborate characters and locations to readers who’ve been waiting to see what lurks in Galadria. Alongside the Knights of the Leaf, for example, are the Twigglia, pixies capable of deadly hypnotism; the Priestesses of Sertania, who abide with snakes; and wraiths that live in the corpse of a frozen dragon. Describing the latter, de Leon writes, “Each of the entities looked like a massless veil of deep shadow, but with a center full of silently erupting electricity.” The author strives a bit too hard for epic drama at times, bowing to a sci-fi/fantasy trope that darkens what is mostly a colorful trilogy. The final battle against the Shadowrays, although brutally violent, is genuinely cathartic.
A grand finish to a YA trilogy that never fails to challenge audience expectations.Pub Date: March 27, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 126
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2014
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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