Someone has left a door open from another world and ``Strangers,'' or fairies, have invaded modern-day Winnipeg. They come in many forms: a hollow man; leather-jacketed girls who squeeze the blood from their dancing partners; hags who suffocate the sleeping. Their allies are yelping dogs with human faces. And they have stolen John Nesbitt's baby sister and left a lazy, burping changeling in her place. John makes a perilous journey to the land of the Strangers to win his sister back from the Fairy Queen, and to save his world from destruction. Basing his story on British folklore from as far back as the 14th century, Nodelman carries the old legends across the Atlantic and grimly into the present. This is odd and harrowing stuff, made stranger by its placement in the context of the contemporary world. That could have led to a credibility problem, but John's matter-of-fact, first- person narration anchors the story in reality: ``Who would believe me? I don't believe me.'' Such truthful reaction forces readers to believe him, and like him, too, for his wryly humorous observations. Too gory for some, but fans of the unusual and macabre will be gripped right through to the satisfying conclusion. (Fiction. 10- 14)
Pub Date: June 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-671-89839-6
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1995
From the demon cat said to stalk the U.S. Capitol building's ``confusing tangle of...winding passageways'' to the swarming ``rats of the Rhine,'' who take terrible vengeance on a man who ordered a peasant massacre, Cohen presents an array of animals who die but refuse to rest, or appear from nowhere only to vanish mysteriously. As always, his reports are drawn from folklore (``King of the Cats''), accounts of psychic investigators, newspaper articles (the Nottingham lion, the recent Chicago kangaroo), or regional ghost story compilations; he relates them calmly, and in an evenhanded manner. Cohen doesn't include source notes; nor does he claim that everything here can be substantiated—but if readers ``happen to believe the story while...reading it, so much the better.'' (Nonfiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: June 18, 1991
ISBN: 0-399-22230-8
Page Count: 111
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
As Livingston says in her introduction, she invites young people ``to make the image, the thought, even the sound [of an experience] come alive...by arranging words, making a sort of music...to experience the joy of making a poem.'' This detailed, carefully organized volume makes the invitation irresistible. Admirably, the author doesn't condescend to her audience by skimping on the complexities; she gives the real concepts and terminology—apostrophe, tercet, consonance, dactyl, cinquain- -building from voice to the patterns and uses of sound to imagery, explaining with consummate clarity and generously providing excellent examples with a wide range of sophistication: Mother Goose to Fitzgerald's Homer. She's never pedantic; her eye and ear are consistently on the poem that the devices serve, while her occasional questions to the reader are not merely rhetorical but well framed to provoke imaginative thought. The last chapter is on concrete poetry, with some delightful examples of typography mimicking and extending meaning. Like a provocative poem, the book leaves readers without a neatly wrapped conclusion—the better, perhaps, to continue their own thoughts. An inspiring introduction to a notably thorny but potentially rewarding topic. Index. (Nonfiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: May 15, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-024019-9
Page Count: 162
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1991
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