The belabored parental conflict, sugarcoated emotions and convenient plot details are cloying. The 12 recipes at the end are...
Can 10-year-old Poppy convince her parents she wants to be a baker and not a witch in yet another fantasy that blends magic and baking?
Poppy Pendle has inherited her magic from her Great-Granny Mabel, but her passion is baking. Her Dursley-like parents send her to the Ruthersfield Academy for young ladies with magic. She excels there, but she hates flying on her broomstick, using her wand and the teasing of the other girls. She runs away to the only place where she is happy, Patisserie Marie Claire, where she can create her own cookies and cakes. When this solution does not pan out, Poppy turns to the dark side of being a witch, hiding in a forsaken cottage and turning animals, her parents, police, birds and squirrels to stone. Her friend Charlie (a girl) and Marie Claire try various “sweet-tempting” plans to bring her back and finally succeed. Poppy and Marie Claire rehab the cottage and open a bakery. Numerous unexplained gaps in the fantasy logic crinkle the storyline, beginning with the “magic” of Poppy’s being born in the Patisserie (thus her passion) and ending with her turned-to-stone parents taking two years to thaw.
The belabored parental conflict, sugarcoated emotions and convenient plot details are cloying. The 12 recipes at the end are the best part; the rest is just half-baked. (Fantasy. 8-11)Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-4679-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers will enjoy this sequel from a plot perspective and will learn how to play-act a trial, though they may not engage...
This sequel to The Lemonade War (2007), picking up just a few days later, focuses on how the fourth graders take justice into their own hands after learning that the main suspect in the case of the missing lemonade-stand money now owns the latest in game-box technology.
Siblings Evan and Jessie (who skipped third grade because of her precocity) are sure Scott Spencer stole the $208 from Evan’s shorts and want revenge, especially as Scott’s new toy makes him the most popular kid in class, despite his personal shortcomings. Jessie’s solution is to orchestrate a full-blown trial by jury after school, while Evan prefers to challenge Scott in basketball. Neither channel proves satisfactory for the two protagonists (whose rational and emotional reactions are followed throughout the third-person narrative), though, ultimately, the matter is resolved. Set during the week of Yom Kippur, the story raises beginning questions of fairness, integrity, sin and atonement. Like John Grisham's Theodore Boone, Kid Lawyer (2010), much of the book is taken up with introducing courtroom proceedings for a fourth-grade level of understanding. Chapter headings provide definitions (“due diligence,” “circumstantial evidence,” etc.) and explanation cards/documents drawn by Jessie are interspersed.
Readers will enjoy this sequel from a plot perspective and will learn how to play-act a trial, though they may not engage with the characters enough to care about how the justice actually pans out. (Fiction. 8-10)Pub Date: May 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-27967-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This kid-friendly satire ably sets claws into a certain real-life franchise.
A trip to the Love Love Angel Kitty World theme park (“The Most Super Incredibly Happy Place on Earth!”) turns out to be an exercise in lowered expectations…to say the least.
When Uncle Murray wins a pair of free passes it seems at first like a dream come true—at least for Kitty, whose collection of Love Love Kitty merch ranges from branded underwear to a pink chainsaw. But the whole trip turns into a series of crises beginning with the (as it turns out) insuperable challenge of getting a cat onto an airplane, followed by the twin discoveries that the hotel room doesn’t come with a litter box and that the park doesn’t allow cats. Even kindhearted Uncle Murray finds his patience, not to say sanity, tested by extreme sticker shock in the park’s gift shop and repeated exposures to Kitty World’s literally nauseating theme song (notation included). He is not happy. Fortunately, the whole cloying enterprise being a fiendish plot to make people so sick of cats that they’ll pick poultry as favorite pets instead, the revelation of Kitty’s feline identity puts the all-chicken staff to flight and leaves the financial coffers plucked. Uncle Murray’s White, dumpy, middle-aged figure is virtually the only human one among an otherwise all-animal cast in Bruel’s big, rapidly sequenced, and properly comical cartoon panels.
This kid-friendly satire ably sets claws into a certain real-life franchise. (Graphic satire. 8-11)Pub Date: Dec. 29, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-20808-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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