A movie crew stirs up old ghosts and new hopes in this probable close to a run of melodramatic mishaps.
The moldering and despised suburb of Spooking not only looks the perfect setting for a planned horror movie, its residents, both living and otherwise, form a ready-made cast. This is particularly the case after the female lead vanishes in the local graveyard, and dazzled young preteen Joy Wells is hired to replace her. Festooned with old curses, creaky doors, sudden gusts and atmospheric extras, the off-camera doings lurch their way fetchingly to a climax. Alas for the adjacent town’s hopes of an economic windfall, the film gets the chop, and so do Joy’s dreams of stardom. Though appealingly large of heart and strong of will, as well as a passionate student and defender of Spooking’s rich history, here Joy must share center stage with several adults whose pasts and inner conflicts are more thoroughly explored than in the earlier books (Unearthly Asylum, 2010, etc.). Furthermore, references throughout to earlier events make the previous episodes required reading, and the end comes in a long, labored tally of revelations, resolutions and reconciliations.
A patchy close to a series built around characters and themes that will have more resonance for grown-ups than kids. Still, young readers who relish gothic comedy may stay the course. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4169-3420-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
Categories: CHILDREN'S MYSTERY & THRILLER | CHILDREN'S SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
When deadly minions of archvillain Ledroptha Curtain escape from prison, the talented young protégés of his twin brother, Nicholas Benedict, reunite for a new round of desperate ploys and ingenious trickery.
Stewart sets the reunion of cerebral Reynie Muldoon Perumal, hypercapable Kate Wetherall, shy scientific genius George “Sticky” Washington, and spectacularly sullen telepath Constance Contraire a few years after the previous episode, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (2009). Providing relief from the quartet’s continual internecine squabbling and self-analysis, he trucks in Tai Li, a grubby, precociously verbal 5-year-old orphan who also happens to be telepathic. (Just to even the playing field a bit, the bad guys get a telepath too.) Series fans will know to be patient in wading through all the angst, arguments, and flurries of significant nose-tapping (occasionally in unison), for when the main action does at long last get under way—the five don’t even set out from Mr. Benedict’s mansion together until more than halfway through—the Society returns to Nomansan Island (get it?), the site of their first mission, for chases, narrow squeaks, hastily revised stratagems, and heroic exploits that culminate in a characteristically byzantine whirl of climactic twists, triumphs, and revelations. Except for brown-skinned George and olive-complected, presumably Asian-descended Tai, the central cast defaults to white; Reynie’s adoptive mother is South Asian.
Clever as ever—if slow off the mark—and positively laden with tics, quirks, and puns. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-45264-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Megan Tingley/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Categories: CHILDREN'S MYSTERY & THRILLER | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Four children find their way into another world through a hidden doorway in a mysterious old piece of furniture.
Gallagher elaborates on this oddly familiar premise by (eventually) explaining that the right sort of wooden joinery will link furniture from any place or time. Billy, his little sister Sophie and their friends Chris and Maggie discover a seemingly endless maze of hallways lined with doors and drawers full of strange artifacts by crawling into a nightstand belonging to missing Uncle Gary. The labyrinth is actually a “cabinet of curiosities” that brilliant carpenters of many generations have been building to store treasures like Excalibur and the Thunderbird Photograph. Before this is explained, however, the four children have spent many chapters wandering the halls at random—and also being menaced in the outside world by animated wooden puppets from the fictional “Zobadak Wood Company,” who are after Uncle Gary and the nightstand at the command of a shadowy figure named Brope. Along with introducing scads of enigmatic elements from flocks of aggressive crows to a mischievous fairy, the author injects artificial melodrama into the tale by having Billy and Sophie rescue their pointlessly kidnapped parents. He clumsily tries for comic relief by casting the puppets as inept Abbott-and-Costello types and with no perceptible rationale closes by having all of the adults stonewall or downplay everything that has happened.
Inventive worldbuilding, but way too much is left unexplained and unresolved. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-934133-32-3
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
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