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
Overall, a solid adventure about a little-known place and time.
Audra doesn’t understand what her parents are hiding until the Cossacks come to arrest them.
It’s June 1893, in what used to be the country of Lithuania but has been part of Russia for years. Twelve-year-old Audra has spent most of her life on her parents’ farm. Her stage-magician father travels, and Audra knows he and her mother are doing something illegal, but she doesn’t know what. When Officer Rusakov arrests them and sets fire to their home, Audra discovers that they’ve been smuggling books—printed in Lithuanian. The Russians long ago banned that language, spoken or written, in an attempt to force assimilation. Even though everyone speaks both languages (Lithuanian in secret), Audra’s parents have kept her illiterate rather than have her attend Russian school. Now she joins a group of rebels smuggling books from printers in Prussia: adults Milda and Ben, and Lukas, a boy her own age. Magic tricks her father taught her allow her to distract her pursuers rather than hide from them. Written from Audra’s first-person point of view, with an all-white cast in keeping with its Eastern European setting, the novel suffers a bit from inconsistent pacing but delivers believable action and suspense. The Cossack leader comes across as a typical evil Russian, but the other characters are more fully drawn.
Overall, a solid adventure about a little-known place and time. (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-338-27547-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
An entertaining sequel that will whet fans’ appetites for the next installment.
It’s the end of the world as they know it, and Magnus Chase and his godly cohorts are back for another round of sword fighting and wisecracking.
With Ragnarok rapidly approaching, Magnus and his friends are charged with retrieving Thor's magical hammer in time to stop giants from invading the human world. This latest installment in Riordan's Nordic-themed fantasy series is a fast-paced adventure narrative featuring snappy dialogue and a diverse cast of well-developed characters. The author possesses a singular talent for re-creating contemporary teenspeak. In his capable hands, Magnus’ cocksure attitude and pithy observations further establish him as completely distinct from other Riordan protagonists as he races from Newbury Street in Boston to Provincetown, Massachusetts, searching for the elusive hammer, which is still missing after the events of series opener The Sword of Summer (2016). The author effectively interposes racial and sexual complexity into the typically all-white Norse mythological world through the addition of Alex Fierro—Muslim Valkyrie Sam’s shape-shifting gender-fluid half sibling—who may or may not be a double agent for their father, Loki. He also deepens the mythology surrounding the Chase family's connection to the various gods, neatly connecting this series with the exploits of Percy Jackson’s Greco-Roman heroine Annabeth Chase.
An entertaining sequel that will whet fans’ appetites for the next installment. (Fantasy. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4231-6092-2
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2016
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