The creators of the Edge Chronicles open a new series aimed at a younger audience with this tale of a lad who discovers that his teachers are all pirates. Supplemented with many hand-drawn letters, clippings and scenes drawn in great detail with almost invisibly fine inked lines, the story takes a wandering course as a mechanical flying horse takes Fergus to the mysterious Fateful Voyage Trading Company. There he meets three talking penguins and an inventor uncle he didn’t know he had, learns that his father had been lost while searching for fabulously valuable fire diamonds and then travels to a remote archipelago to rescue his classmates, who had been kidnapped by his father’s treacherous crew to gather the diamonds from volcanic caverns. Despite the elaborate black-and-white art and frequent artificial efforts to pump up the suspense, readers aren’t likely to stay the course; Stewart spends too much time introducing a large cast of characters who mostly just pass in review, and the melodramatic bits don’t arrive until very late. Missable. (Fantasy. 10-12)
Pub Date: May 23, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-75088-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: David Fickling/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
Eduar (Jooka Saves the Day, 1997, etc.) composes here a classic dreamtime walkabout, a wonder quest, that starts when Anatole the bactrian camel begins to read from his “ancient book” and the boy Jules drifts off to sleep between the camel’s humps. Anatole is on the move, swimming the Southern Sea, surfing through crashing breakers, getting lost in the jungle outside Quito, scaling peaks, outrunning lightning. All the while, Jules snoozes peacefully away. Eduar catches the action in rhyme, one sentence to a page, with Anatole’s dashing feats on the left, and Jules’s torpor noted on the right: “Anatole rides bravely along a wire from the trees./Jules is kissed by an orchid-scented breeze.” The artwork is up to the energy and the exoticism of the tale, with great cymbal-crashes of vivid color conjuring a thunderstorm, a foaming sea, a busy street. Despite such charged images, the book works as a lullaby: Jules may bounce around the world, but still he slumbers on. (Picture book. 2-5)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-531-30202-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Orchard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Deliberately constructed, Wilson’s wordless picture book makes an adroit and whimsical artistic statement and invites audience participation. On the title page, a child’s hands reach toward a bundle of colored pencils dangling from a branch; the pencils are in bright colors but everything else is sketched in black and white. In careful detail, the child draws a magpie seen on a branch outside the window (perhaps the same branch where the pencils were hung) and when the drawing is completed, the bird flies away from the paper. The child draws cherries, shimmering red on the page, and the bird eats them; the child draws an orange balloon, which the bird pops. Things get a little dangerous when the bird grabs a piece of yellow that sets the page afire and then scribbles blue water that makes a mess. Drawings and events co-determine each other: the child has cages the magpie, the bird grabs the eraser through the bars and escapes the cage, and so it goes, to a last laugh when a claw seizes the pencils and makes a brilliant rainbow of feathers. The only words are the names of the colors, appearing at the end. The realistic drawing style and the use of saturated color on an otherwise black-and-white page are an arresting combination. (Picture book. 3-7)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8037-2354-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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