Etchemendy (Crystal City, not reviewed) mixes quick action and long thoughts in this tale of a lad who discovers that changing the past is a tricky business. When a gimpy old man, smelling of ozone, pops up from nowhere and hands him a palm-sized time machine, Gib Finney is understandably dazzled by the possibilities. But his excitement changes to anguish when he loops back in time to prevent first his little sister, then her sitter, from being run down by a truck, and learns that there’s a momentum to events that is hard to divert. Gib’s increasing desperation, as he tries to figure out how to head off what he knows is about to happen, injects suspense into the story, and his misadventures with the “unner” prompt insights into how minor incidents or casual choices often have far-reaching, unpredictable consequences. In the end, he does manage to keep anyone else from being hurt, at the cost of having his own leg crushed (readers will have twigged to the mysterious old man’s identity long before this) and the “unner” suffers the same fate. This hangs together better than William Sleator’s similarly premised Rewind (1999), but readers who assume from the cover illustration that it's a comedy are in for a shock. (Fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: May 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8126-2850-0
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
A thought-provoking title for sophisticated readers.
A missing boy returns from another world. Will anyone believe his story?
When 12-year-old Aidan goes missing, his family and community members search everywhere in their small town. Things progress from worrying to terrifying when Aidan doesn’t turn up. No note. No trace. Not even a body. Six days later, Aidan’s younger brother, Lucas, finds Aidan alive in the attic they’d searched many times before. Aidan claims he was in a magical world called Aveinieu and that he got there through a dresser. While everyone around the brothers searches for answers, Lucas gets Aidan to open up about Aveinieu. Lucas, who narrates the story, grapples with the impossibility of the situation as he pieces it all together. Is any part of Aidan’s story true? YA veteran Levithan’s first foray into middle grade is a poignant tale of brotherly love and family trauma. The introspective writing, funneled through a precocious narrator, is as much about what truth means as about what happened. Though an engaging read for the way it makes readers consider and reconsider the mystery, the slow burn may deter those craving tidy resolutions. Bookish readers, however, will delight in the homages to well-known books, including When You Reach Me and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The cast defaults to White; the matter-of-fact inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters is noteworthy.
A thought-provoking title for sophisticated readers. (Mystery/fantasy. 10-13)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984848-59-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
Less charming than the opener but does feature a thimbleful of moral quandary at its center.
Armed only with her magical sewing needle, foundling mouse Delphine sets out to confront the cruel rat king in this duology closer.
As vicious rat armies pillage the mouse realms in search of her and her pointy, long-hidden treasure, Delphine finds herself waging an inner war that parallels the outer one. According to dusty documents and other reputable sources, the needle’s good powers can be perverted, but she sees no other way except killing to stop evil rat King Midnight. While struggling with a grim determination to go over to the dark side that sets her at odds with her own fundamentally loving nature, Delphine threads her way along with loyal allies past various scrapes—only to come, climactically, face to face with not only her nemesis, but her own past. Moon stitches in flashbacks to fill out the details of a tragic old love triangle that reaches its fruition here and sews her tale up with a return to Château Desjardins just in time for Cinderella’s wedding and a celebratory rodentine ball in the chandelier overhead, and she leaves a fringe of epilogue hinting at further installments to come.
Less charming than the opener but does feature a thimbleful of moral quandary at its center. (secret codes) (Animal fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-368-04833-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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