Monty Python teams up with Maxwell Smart for a wrestling match with Tolkien—splendid.
Spy thrills meet fantasy rivalries as an elitist elf and a bookish goblin strike up a cross-cultural kerfuffle in Anderson and Yelchin’s collaborative meditation on prejudice.
Scholar Brangwain Spurge of the Realm of Elfland is sent to deliver a historically significant gift to the ruler of the neighboring goblins—and to make some covert observations. Little does he know that his spy mission, related in multipage wordless sequences of black-and-white illustrations, is in fact an assassination. Meanwhile, in an interleaved third-person prose narrative, Werfel, a goblin archivist, is thrilled to meet and host the elf historian, sure that they will find fertile common ground to begin easing the 1,000-year-old tension between their two kingdoms. Dismayed, however, by Spurge’s lack of appreciation and downright snobbishness, Werfel is horrified to find his guest has betrayed his hospitality and caught the attention of the goblin secret police as their two kingdoms head, once again, toward conflict. Occasional letters from Elfland’s spymaster assist the two primary narratives. The book makes no secret about its own position even as it cheerfully asks readers to think critically about ideologies and their agendas and the manufactured barriers of misinformation and misunderstanding. Together, Anderson and Yelchin craft something that feels impossible, a successfully unorthodox epistolary, pictorial, and prose narrative that interrogates the cultural ramifications of unchallenged viewpoints and the government violence they abet even as it recounts the comedic blunderings of a spy mission gone wrong.
Monty Python teams up with Maxwell Smart for a wrestling match with Tolkien—splendid. (Fantasy. 10-16)Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7636-9822-5
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Returning fans, anyway, will pounce.
Houck kicks off a new story arc in the world of the Tiger’s Curse series with new tigers who live in a northerly setting.
The death of their widowed royal mother touches off a crisis in the Kievian Empire; neither Stacia nor Verusha Stepanov, 17-year-old sword-wielding twin sisters, wants to be named tsarina. But questions of succession get put on hold when a battle with a sorcerer inexplicably turns the two into nonspeaking Siberian tigers. Hints of a cure send them, along with a growing entourage of men to provide assistance (and, perforce, do all the talking), on a long trek. Though most of the cast sticks to genre type, Houck throws in a wild card in the form of hunky, inarticulate Nikolai, who joins the quest because he is enthralled by Verusha—and who also killed his whole family in an act of revenge. Occasional anachronistic dialogue (e.g., “Are you ready, ladies?”) disrupts the tale’s generally earnest tone, as do the clumsy attempts at banter. A third tiger, snarky and blind but conveniently able to see through others’ eyes, trots in late in the story. The events in this setup volume unfold with many a flashback and change in point of view and head toward no sort of resolution—only the cave-dwelling White Shaman of the Tundra’s advice that further journeys are in the offing. The central cast in this Russian-inspired fantasy world presents white; the Indigenous population includes nomadic reindeer herders.
Returning fans, anyway, will pounce. (Fantasy. 13-16)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9798212221696
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Blackstone
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Characters to love, quips to snort at, insights to ponder: typical Spinelli.
For two teenagers, a small town’s annual cautionary ritual becomes both a life- and a death-changing experience.
On the second Wednesday in June, every eighth grader in Amber Springs, Pennsylvania, gets a black shirt, the name and picture of a teen killed the previous year through reckless behavior—and the silent treatment from everyone in town. Like many of his classmates, shy, self-conscious Robbie “Worm” Tarnauer has been looking forward to Dead Wed as a day for cutting loose rather than sober reflection…until he finds himself talking to a strange girl or, as she would have it, “spectral maiden,” only he can see or touch. Becca Finch is as surprised and confused as Worm, only remembering losing control of her car on an icy slope that past Christmas Eve. But being (or having been, anyway) a more outgoing sort, she sees their encounter as a sign that she’s got a mission. What follows, in a long conversational ramble through town and beyond, is a day at once ordinary yet rich in discovery and self-discovery—not just for Worm, but for Becca too, with a climactic twist that leaves both ready, or readier, for whatever may come next. Spinelli shines at setting a tongue-in-cheek tone for a tale with serious underpinnings, and as in Stargirl (2000), readers will be swept into the relationship that develops between this adolescent odd couple. Characters follow a White default.
Characters to love, quips to snort at, insights to ponder: typical Spinelli. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-30667-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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