Series fans will still enjoy this entry, though the earnest overwhelms the playful.
In which two teens and a mechanical pet fox are kidnapped into a flying circus.
Lily’s 14th birthday is a thorough letdown. Papa’s received an award from the Mechanists’ Guild, so her celebration’s been postponed until after the boring award ceremony full of stuffy men who sneer infuriatingly about hybrids—humans who have some mechanical parts. (None of them knows, of course, that Lily herself is a forbidden hybrid, kept alive by the Cogheart.) How convenient that someone unknown has left her a parcel as an invitation to adventure, containing a creepy rhyme, a notebook of her dead mother’s, and VIP tickets to Slimwood’s Stupendous Skycircus. Accompanied by two human friends, Robert and Tolly, and Malkin the mechanimal fox, Lily attends this unpleasant show, where the attractions are miserable-looking hybrid teens. The kids resolve to rescue the show’s star, the winged girl Angelique, but she, Robert, and Malkin are nabbed themselves. In a heavy-handed disability storyline, the circus owners treat the hybrid characters as grotesques on display. Though the hybrids’ existence—with mechanical parts as prosthetics, a pacemaker, or a post-human transcendence of brittle bones—raises interesting questions, they’re resolved with a bland message of universal humanity. Angelique’s blackness in this overwhelmingly white world, on the other hand, barely rates a mention. Still, the pacing is exhilarating despite a surfeit of meaningful speeches.
Series fans will still enjoy this entry, though the earnest overwhelms the playful. (map, glossary) (Steampunk fantasy. 10-13)Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63163-431-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Jolly Fish Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Series fans, at least, will take this outing (and clear evidence of more to come) in stride.
Zipping back and forth in time atop outsized robo–bell bottoms, mad inventor Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) legs his way to center stage in this slightly less-labored continuation of episode 9.
The action commences after a rambling recap and a warning not to laugh or smile on pain of being forced to read Sarah Plain and Tall. Pilkey first sends his peevish protagonist back a short while to save the Earth (destroyed in the previous episode), then on to various prehistoric eras in pursuit of George, Harold and the Captain. It’s all pretty much an excuse for many butt jokes, dashes of off-color humor (“Tippy pressed the button on his Freezy-Beam 4000, causing it to rise from the depths of his Robo-Pants”), a lengthy wordless comic and two tussles in “Flip-o-rama.” Still, the chase kicks off an ice age, the extinction of the dinosaurs and the Big Bang (here the Big “Ka-Bloosh!”). It ends with a harrowing glimpse of what George and Harold would become if they decided to go straight. The author also chucks in a poopy-doo-doo song with musical notation (credited to Albert P. Einstein) and plenty of ink-and-wash cartoon illustrations to crank up the ongoing frenzy.
Series fans, at least, will take this outing (and clear evidence of more to come) in stride. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-17536-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2013
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