The Loch Ness Monster lives in this latest adventure by award-winning author Zindel (The Pigman and Me, 1992, etc.). The beast resides in small Lake Alban in Vermont with his wife and little monsters, trapped there by a man-made salmon grid that blocks the lake's opening back to the deep waters of Lake Champlain. The monster is no mythical creature here but a plesiosaur—a prehistoric cetacean that has survived until the present. Loch, a 15-year-old so nicknamed because he claimed to have seen the Loch Ness Monster (``Nessie'') ten years earlier in Scotland, lives with his father, Dr. Sam Perkins, and his younger sister, Zaidee, near the lake. Dr. Sam, a marine biologist, works for Anthony Cavenger, who spends fortunes seeking out monsters like Big Foot and Nessie. After reported sightings at Lake Alban, Cavenger and his pseudoscientific, paramilitary organization go to Vermont to investigate. They find the plesiosaurs—who have not devolved like the once fierce sturgeon, as an unlucky photographer and a local yokel discover the hard way. Ruthless Cavenger intends to take the animals alive, dead, or blown to bits. But Loch, Zaidee, and Cavenger's teenage daughter, Sarah, have discovered and befriended a young plesiosaur. They realize that the plesiosaurs are highly intelligent and sensitive creatures, and that it is up to them to save the magnificent beasts. Fast, furious, and masterful. (Fiction. 12+)
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1994
ISBN: 0-06-024542-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1994
Karr (The Cave, 1994, etc.) chooses the silent film studios during WW I as a backdrop for twin adolescent film stars Fitzhugh and Nelly Dalton's discovery of a ring of German sympathizers. Although their father's suspicious death in the explosion of a munitions dump has forced the twins and their mother to move out of Manhattan, things are looking up for the scrappy family. Fitzhugh and Nelly will star in a new film serial, In the Kaiser's Clutch, written and sold to the studio by their mother. The twins eventually uncover their leading man as the brains behind a secret German bomb factory. By juxtaposing plot summaries of each serial installment at the opening of every chapter and then describing all the hard work that goes into the segments, Karr accurately recreates the early film industry, and those who can give themselves up wholeheartedly to some of the campier aspects of this will have a ball. The plot is stuffed with cornball jokes, wooden dialogue, and clichÇd happy family scenes; the German characters are reduced to thick-accented, shifty-eyed, bravado-spouting villains, and the novel ultimately becomes as jingoistic as the fictional serial at its core. (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-33638-5
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
In a suspenseful first novel, a complacent teenager's intended tryst becomes a weekend of stunning self-discovery. Anticipating a delicious reunion with his high-school sweetheart, Didra, Eric arrives at a secluded country house to find a fugitive from a nearby juvenile-detention center holed up there. Griffin is a paradox: tough, brutally scarred, sporting a self-made tattoo, yet magnetically charming and surprisingly well-educated; Didra, when she arrives, is fascinated by him and his tale of being framed on drug charges. As circumstances force the two young men into reluctant cooperation, the well-planned life Eric is weaving for himself begins to unravel under Griffin's merciless scrutiny. After a shocking series of revelations—Didra's faithlessness to Eric, in the service of her TV career, is only the first—Eric finds himself swinging between rage, fear, desire for Griffin's sister Jojo and confusion at what is, by his lights, irrational behavior. Still, in the end, refusing to let Griffin face the music alone, he gives up a chance to get away. The nature and value of art is an important subtheme here; strong or weak, most of these characters are artists. The author tries their mettle in an intricately complex situation—laced with storms of emotion and violence (Griffin spends most of the novel bleeding from one wound or another)—and ably delivers some sharp insights into what makes people tick. (Fiction. YA)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-385-30855-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1993
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