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
Low in physical violence, while being rich in moral and ethical issues, as well as in appealingly complex characters and...
Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-316-05777-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Megan Tingley/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
A half-baked jumble of poorly connected themes, incidents, and tropes.
Eleven-year-old Georgie sets out to the rescue after seeing his dad snatched into thin air by a hideous figure.
In a confusing debut that reads like a first draft, the kidnapping impels the young slingshot expert to go from doggedly enduring vicious bullying at school to intrepidly plunging after his father through a portal to Scatterplot, an otherworldly realm where the memories of everyone in New York are uploaded by omnilingual Scribes. Classmates Apurva Aluwhalia (who’s cued South Asian) and Roscoe Harris (who reads Black and is confined to a role that’s largely limited to comic relief), each motivated by their own concerns, follow white-presenting Georgie on his adventure. In Scatterplot, they must remain alert for the “tribe” of “bad people” called Altercockers, formed by the exiled Rollie D. Meanwhile, Flint Eldritch, the menacing figure who was responsible for Georgie’s father’s disappearance, is bent on using the Aetherquill, a magical pen that can rewrite reality in unpredictable ways, to replace all those recorded memories with fake ones. In a story that’s marred by stilted dialogue, flat characterization, and awkward turns of phrase, Georgie and his friends, along with Scatterplot siblings Edie and Ore, embark on a quest to save both his father and the entire realm. The puss-oozing, misshapen villain Flint, crawling with bugs, does at least provide a memorably lurid element of horror. The novel ends with an abrupt cliffhanger.
A half-baked jumble of poorly connected themes, incidents, and tropes. (Fantasy. 10-13)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798886453164
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
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