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MAXIM'S ALL NIGHT DINER

Name: MAXIM'S ALL NIGHT DINER
Author: Mikka Haugaard
ISBN: 978-1-911427-00-1

by Mikka Haugaard ; illustrated by Steph von Reiswitz ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 25, 2017

Too twee for its own good.

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Annabel’s curious about witches; will that be the end of her?

Annabel’s writing a book about witches. The white Londoner wants to know everything about them. When she meets Patrick, a green-haired white boy, on the top deck of a double-decker bus, he informs her he can tell her everything about witches—but it’ll be dangerous. Annabel’s still eager; he takes her down a street she’s never seen even though it’s near where she lives and introduces her to his mother, Mrs. Rainbow. They take her to Maxim’s All Night Diner, where all manner of strange creatures gather and trade stories. There, Annabel learns she’ll have to tell a story, and she may be trapped in that story (especially since Mrs. Rainbow has cursed her for saying “please,” which witches cannot abide). After several wild tales, it’s Annabel’s turn. Will she survive? Haugaard’s self-consciously whimsical debut is a meandering and, at times, nonsensical muddle. The stories-within-a-story conceit gets away from the author early, due mostly to tricky use of punctuation conventions. Stories are initially introduced as spoken dialogue but then lose their quotation marks, presumably to make it clear when characters within them are speaking, but they are so short and dialogue tags elided often enough that readers may find themselves confused as to which story they are in. Poor copy editing compounds the confusion.

Too twee for its own good. (Fiction. 8-10)

Pub Date: May 25, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-911427-00-1

Page Count: 208

Publisher: Everything With Words

Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017

Categories:

CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S

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GHOSTLY THIEF OF TIME

From the EMU Club series , Vol. 2

by Ruben Bolling ; illustrated by Ruben Bolling ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 3, 2015

A pleaser for Wimpy Kid fans as well as any students who find the last few minutes before the bell rings an eternity.

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The discovery that time actually does move more slowly in the back of a classroom than in the front puts a trio of amateur sleuths on the trail of even more startling revelations.

It looks like the Exploration-Mystery-Unbelievable Club’s search for a new mystery to investigate is going nowhere, until school starts and club president Stuart’s complaint that the afternoons really seem to drag leads to a surreptitious experiment with an astonishing result. As it turns out, the maintenance closet adjacent to the back wall is a time portal, and new custodian Mr. Hartoonian is a traveler sent from the future to prevent an upcoming world war. Unfortunately, the club’s interference not only derails his mission, but leaves him stranded in this era with a broken time machine. Even with help from Stuart’s dog, Ferdinand, who is, as readers of Alien Invasion in My Backyard (2015) will know, an alien robot, getting said mission back on track and saving the Earth (once again) isn’t going to be easy. Bolling casts his officious narrator as a legend in his own mind, surrounds him with smarter allies, trucks in a particularly lamebrain bully, and presents the headlong caper as a hand-lettered “official report” on graph paper with taped-in cartoon “photographs.” An appendix offers basic information about actual emus and briefly outlines the “butterfly effect.”

A pleaser for Wimpy Kid fans as well as any students who find the last few minutes before the bell rings an eternity. (Graphic/hybrid mystery. 8-10)

Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-4494-5710-5

Page Count: 140

Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing

Review Posted Online: July 21, 2015

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015

Categories:

CHILDREN'S GENERAL CHILDREN'S

- BOOK REVIEW
ALIEN INVASION IN MY BACKYARD
by Ruben Bolling ; illustrated by Ruben Bolling

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LEGENDARY ROUTES OF THE WORLD

by Alexandre Verhille & Sarah Tavernier ; illustrated by Alexandre Verhille & Sarah Tavernier ; translated by David Henry Wilson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 25, 2015

Unlikely to prod children out of their armchairs to undertake their own voyages of discovery, but the lighthearted...

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A pop-up commemoration of five historic journeys for would-be travelers to attempt—both on the Earth and beyond it.

All are challenging but (at least theoretically) retraceable. Arranged in no particular order, spreads open on map after map. There’s the Toulouse-to-Santiago mail route that Antoine de St. Exupéry and other intrepid early French aviators flew for Aéropostale; the trans-Atlantic “Route du Rhum” for solo sailors; the Silk Road; America’s Route 66; and the Apollo moon voyages. Dramatic pop-ups range from a motorcycle with sidecar roaring out of a Southwestern sunset to a multilevel tableau of horseback merchants and explorers venturing east to west and meeting in the middle with a similar, camelback cavalcade going the other way. Each opening features mileage, a date or era, and brief background notes on the route’s significance and selected highlights. A stylishly mustached figure and an eager dog appear also somewhere in each scene—including the lunar landing—as stand-ins for viewers…or possibly the book’s creators.

Unlikely to prod children out of their armchairs to undertake their own voyages of discovery, but the lighthearted suggestion that it’s the journey, not the destination, that matters most won’t go amiss. (Informational pop-up. 8-10)