Readers fond of nonstop adventures thickly stocked with variously clawed, tentacled, tusked, venomous, tattooed, insidious, blood-drinking, slime-vomiting plug-uglies will be in hog heaven over this imported series opener, trendily bound in a jacketless pictorial cover. Young Twig has grown up as the foundling child of a peaceable, none-too-bright pair of wood trolls. But he enters a different destiny when he strays off a marked path into the trackless Deepwoods, where challenges as diverse as the aptly named Halitoad, tribble/piranha hybrids dubbed Wigwigs, toothy Bloodoaks, and, most horrible of all, a cooing, preteen, makeover-happy Termagant Trog await. All will be escaped by the skin of his teeth and, as he's not particularly strong, brave, or clever, with the help of mysterious strangers. Rendered in realistic, gloriously obsessive detail in dozens of drawings, the monsters seem to leap (or ooze) to life-sometimes so vividly that Twig seems to fade into the background. By the end, though, he's eluded them all, reunited with his real father aboard a flying pirate ship, and is sailing off into the simultaneously published sequel, Stormchaser (ISBN: 0-385-75070-6), with more sequels to come. Good fun, though the supporting cast tends to overshadow the plot. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: June 22, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-75068-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: David Fickling/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
Opening episodes of a comic-book series created by an American teacher in Japan take a leap into chapter-book format, with only partial success. Resembling—in occasional illustrations—a button-eyed, juvenile Olive Oyl, Akiko, 10, is persuaded by a pair of aliens named Bip and Bop to climb out her high-rise bedroom’s window for a trip to M&M-shaped Planet Smoo, where Prince Fropstoppit has been kidnapped by widely feared villainness Alia Rellaport. Along with an assortment of contentious sidekicks, including brainy Mr. Beeba, Akiko battles Sky Pirates and video-game-style monsters in prolonged scenes of cartoony violence, displaying resilience, courage, and leadership ability, but not getting very far in her rescue attempt; in fact, the story cuts off so abruptly, with so little of the quest completed, and at a lull in the action to boot, that readers expecting a self-contained (forget complete) story are likely to feel cheated. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-32724-2
Page Count: 162
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Kurtz (I’m Sorry, Almira Ann, 1999, etc.) turns personal disaster into a universally affecting book about the 1997 flooding of the Red River in Grand Forks, North Dakota. Pictures and text catapult readers into the experience of loss when a river swells higher than anyone could have imagined and floods a town. Fleeing her home, the narrator leaves her cat behind and spends much of the flood’s aftermath missing her “motor-stomach Kiwi cat” as her family sleeps on the shelter’s hard cots; knows that “someday I’ll do the same for someone else” as she accepts provisions others have anonymously donated and delivered; sifts through the family’s sodden Christmas box to find mostly useless evidence of happy memories; and sees the unutterable mess and loss of all that is home, which will finally, ironically, be washed away by a new, life-saving dike. The beautifully articulate poems chronicle as well the loss of a good neighborhood, one where people save a cat because they can and it’s a good thing to do, just as they would, in happier times, have loaned a cup of sugar. Without sentimentality, the book speaks of loss as elemental as the force bringing it and of survival of equal magnitude. Brennan’s stylish oils, sometimes framed on a page, sometimes in full-bleed pages or spreads, capture and express this blend of specific universality. A book that belongs on every shelf in buildings up and down the country’s riverways. (Picture book/poetry. 5-10)
Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-689-82049-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
