This first fantastic installment of the His Dark Materials trilogy propels readers along with horror and high adventure, a...
Pullman (The Tin Princess, 1994, etc.) returns to the familiar territory of Victorian England, but this time inhabits an alternate Earth, where magic is an ordinary fact of life.
Lyra Belacqua and her daemon familiar Pantalaimon spend their days teasing the scholars of Jordan College until her uncle, Lord Asriel, announces that he's learned of astonishing events taking place in the far north involving the aurora borealis. When Lyra rescues Asriel from an attempt on his life, it is only the beginning of a torrent of events that finds Lyra willingly abducted by the velvet Mrs. Coulter, a missionary of pediatric atrocities; a journey with gyptian clansmen to rescue the children who are destined to be severed from their daemons (an act that is clearly hideous); and Lyra's discovery of her unusual powers and destiny. Lyra may suffer from excessive spunk, but she is thorough, intelligent, and charming. The author's care in recreating Victorian speech affectations never hinders the action; copious amounts of gore will not dissuade the squeamish, for resonating at the story's center is the twinkling image of a celestial city.
This first fantastic installment of the His Dark Materials trilogy propels readers along with horror and high adventure, a shattering tale that begins with a promise and delivers an entire universe. (Fiction. 12+)Pub Date: April 1, 1996
ISBN: 978-0-679-87942-4
Page Count: 397
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch.
A Jewish girl joins up with Polish resistance groups to fight for her people against the evils of the Holocaust.
Chaya Lindner is forcibly separated from her family when they are consigned to the Jewish ghetto in Krakow. The 16-year-old is taken in by the leaders of Akiva, a fledgling Jewish resistance group that offers her the opportunity to become a courier, using her fair coloring to pass for Polish and sneak into ghettos to smuggle in supplies and information. Chaya’s missions quickly become more dangerous, taking her on a perilous journey from a disastrous mission in Krakow to the ghastly ghetto of Lodz and eventually to Warsaw to aid the Jews there in their gathering uprising inside the walls of the ghetto. Through it all, she is partnered with a secretive young girl whom she is reluctant to trust. The trajectory of the narrative skews toward the sensational, highlighting moments of resistance via cinematic action sequences but not pausing to linger on the emotional toll of the Holocaust’s atrocities. Younger readers without sufficient historical knowledge may not appreciate the gravity of the events depicted. The principal characters lack depth, and their actions and the situations they find themselves in often require too much suspension of disbelief to pass for realism.
Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch. (afterword) (Historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-338-14847-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
A solid genre outing.
In the near future, an incarcerated teen with a reputation for escape attempts is moved to a new, maximum-security facility called the Rig, an oil-drilling platform in the middle of the Arctic Ocean, now converted to use as a prison.
Fifteen-year-old William Drake is a likable, tough-talking narrator who hails from London, the son of an African-American father and a Polish mother. True to hard-boiled type, Drake keeps to himself and resists making friends, even as he makes enemies of the worst baddies by defending weaker kids from them and is won over by the Rig's kindly psychologist, Dr. Lambros. Flavoring the third-person narration with some great one-liners (“She had the voice of a lifelong smoker thrown in a blender”), Ducie takes his time setting the stage for the action-packed second half of the novel, with Drake carefully plotting an escape that involves the skills of his hacker cellmate, Tristan, and the knowledge of Irene, a fellow prisoner who hints at a conspiracy that eventually blows up in their faces. All the elements of a great thriller are here—sinister villains, a stoic hero with a heart of gold, even mutated sharks. If some of these details seem a bit familiar to seasoned action-adventure fans, there is still plenty to keep them engaged, and the open-ended conclusion suggests there may be more to come.
A solid genre outing. (Thriller. 13-18)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-50311-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
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