Lily’s fans will look forward to the sequel set up at the close.
Can teen pig Lily realize her dream to fly with the power of science?
Lily’s engineer father, Professor Fatchops, has long been working on powered flight, but the government has other priorities. Lily and her younger cousin Archie secretly take up the task of creating a plane that doesn’t need magic to stay aloft. Just as she’s one model away from success, warthogs from the wilds west of the mountains attack in aircraft. With a few tweaks, Lily has a working plane ready to answer the warthogs’ next attack. Her actions are greeted with acclaim, but when her secret’s revealed, her father’s angry outburst sends Lily on another mission…to try to reason with the warthogs. What she finds over the mountains is a magical surprise—and a terrifying threat on both physical and supernatural fronts. Abadzis sets his piggie parable in a steampunk-y world that looks a lot like early-20th-century America at its outset. Experienced readers will easily predict the tale’s trajectory, as it follows in the trotters of fantasy comics past, which means it also acts as a nice primer for middle graders just starting out in the genre. Dye’s colorful artwork fleshes out both the anthropomorphic pigs, clothing them in period garb that’s filled out with very humanlike physiques, and their world, which expands impressively once Lily reaches the dominion of the warthogs.
Lily’s fans will look forward to the sequel set up at the close. (Graphic fantasy. 9-14)Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62672-743-4
Page Count: 210
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
An imaginative premise ill-served by its execution.
It’s a pirate’s life for Lintang.
For Lintang, humans and “mythies,” magical powerful creatures, tensely coexist. (A creature profile foreshadows some chapters.) Inspired by legends, Lintang yearns for adventure beyond her home island of Tolus. However, she only manages to make trouble despite good intentions and warnings from best friend Bayani. Her fortune turns when the infamous pirate captain Shafira appears, offering to rid the island of a deadly Night Terror in exchange for a child from the village—a necessity for a ship’s safe passage past Nyasamdra, the island’s sea guardian. Impressed by Lintang’s spunk, Shafira takes the girl onboard, promising a safe return and a priceless necklace to Lintang’s mother as collateral. The all-female pirate crew prepares to hunt sirens when attacks from mythies and a stowaway Bayani—as a boy, vulnerable to sirens’ calls—reveal a more complicated history. A bigger adventure ensues. Lintang’s impulsive tendencies push the plot along, at times frustratingly so. Moss models characters and worldbuilding after aspects of Southeast Asian cultures and Indonesian myths in addition to Western folklore and her own imagination. Inconsistencies coupled with the lack of a cohesive cultural system lead to disjointed details that detract from the story. Several twists provide a peak in intrigue and possibilities but in the end generate more questions than answers, hinting at a sequel.
An imaginative premise ill-served by its execution. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-328-46030-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Engaging, suspenseful, and with nearly all the vivid fighting confined to robots, this gritty tale is perfect for a younger...
In a nasty, hyperstratified future, white twins Vick and Tara are on their own in the scary streets of Chicago, where economic disaster has laid waste to the poorer sections of the city.
Although Tara is autistic—communicative but faced with worsening symptoms—she has a remarkable talent for designing the robot watchdogs that everyone uses for a variety of purposes. The pair scrounge for saleable electronics all day long in the blocks-long dump that’s developed in their part of the city, and at night Tara tinkers. But after she finds an amazing chip among the debris, she crafts a seemingly sentient little critter, Daisy. Daisy’s astonishing capabilities immediately attract the attention of the cruel overlord of the Chicago robotics world, Ms. Alba, an Asian woman who uses a group of imprisoned, mostly child workers to turn out watchdog robots. Her minions kidnap the siblings, but with Daisy’s help they break out. It’s only after they begin to accept help from other street kids that the believably portrayed Vick and Tara start to make a bit of progress. The grim setting is vividly depicted, and the clever-kid–against–mean-adult trope is both plausible and very satisfying. The fast-paced narrative readily conveys the looming sense of ever present danger.
Engaging, suspenseful, and with nearly all the vivid fighting confined to robots, this gritty tale is perfect for a younger audience than most post-apocalyptic stories. (Post-apocalyptic adventure. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5247-1384-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
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