A diverting combination of ecology and spirituality, despite a few snags.
In this second middle-grade novel in a series, a girl learns more about her shared destiny with a hawk.
Claire, who’s nearly 12, moved to a small town in Pennsylvania six months ago. She’s always had a long-standing, special connection with birds, but it deepened after she met Jerry, a 71-year-old Earth wizard and Guardian of the Woods. Through him, she discovered that her fate is bound to that of Ku-Khain, a female red-tailed hawk. Jerry believes that Claire must learn to enter the Now, a spiritual state “outside of time and space,” to receive a message from Ku-Khain, and although he insists that entering the Now is “as natural as breathing,” Claire doubts herself. Billionaire ornithologist Robert Crawley dreams of adding the nearly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker to his life list of personally identified birds, so Claire offers her special help (“Jerry says I keep birds in my heart and that makes them come to me”). Crawley takes Claire and two of her friends, Victor and Billy,with him on an expedition to find the woodpecker in White River National Wildlife Refuge in Arkansas, where the bird was last seen. Although not everything goes as planned, Claire moves further along in her spiritual journey. As in the previous volume, An Odd Bird (2020), Butler draws well-informed connections with environmental issues. This sequel presents Claire with several obstacles that tie in nicely with her age, such as the fact that she has a distracting crush on the ornithologist. Similarly, Claire isn’t an automatic virtuoso but is appropriately fledglinglike in how she tries to master her abilities. A few narrative obstacles feel contrived, though, as when Butler withholds important information for flimsy reasons. The prose style can also be awkward at times, as when the author uses the word jettison to mean jump or employs belabored descriptions: “ ‘I have to go!’ she whined, linking her strange behavior to a biological urgency.”
A diverting combination of ecology and spirituality, despite a few snags.Pub Date: March 17, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-9820342-5-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Pinchey House Press
Review Posted Online: March 25, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Sweetly magical.
Seven-year-old Grace knows a great many words, but she can’t bring herself to string them together on paper.
In her eyes, this gift is unique to her writer aunt, Lily, with whom she spends her afternoons. Lily, however, has found herself bereft of ideas, and out of desperation she puts out an ad for a writing assistant. Enter Rex: a dog whose apparent oddities cleverly conceal a magic that, while unexplained, is quietly remarkable. Rex inspires Lily almost immediately, and the two find happiness in their new partnership. Similarly, Rex inspires Grace to turn her words into stories. Her reservations will feel familiar to any fledgling pen-pusher: not knowing how to write what she feels, how to start, or how to press on. Those reservations extend into her everyday life, as it fills and changes in ways she never foresaw, but her small network—loving (if busy and often absent) parents, the wondrous Rex, Lily and her writing group, the encouraging teacher Ms. Luce, and steadfast, unflappable Daniel, Grace’s best friend—remains by her side throughout her writer’s journey. MacLachlan spins from simple words an enigmatic, gentle, but perhaps too succinct tale. While Grace’s first-person narration doesn’t quite ring true to her young age, (a lack of contractions makes the prose oddly formal), charmingly scratchy pencil sketches scattered throughout mitigate this alienating effect. The only physical descriptions to be found are attached to the animal characters.
Sweetly magical. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-294098-8
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Delightfully weird and whimsical.
A 13-year-old girl and a colony of bats overcome losses in this middle-grade debut from Ready Player One author Cline.
After Opal B. Flats’ mother dies, she goes to live with Uncle Roscoe on the family farm in the Texas Hill Country. Her first night there, she has an alien encounter and subsequently discovers that she can communicate with the Mexican free-tailed bats living in a nearby cave. Their connection becomes essential when Opal, Uncle Roscoe, and the bats, through differing circumstances, are forced to find new homes. Opal and Uncle Roscoe, who read white, convince the bats to accompany them to Austin, “the only place in this whole stone-hearted state where weirdos are welcome!” If Opal and Uncle Roscoe have a slow start with fitting in, it’s even more difficult for a colony of over a million bats, especially when prejudice against them is being systematically reinforced by a greedy councilman whose pesticide business suffers when the bats start eating insects. The third-person narration unfolds in a homey style that’s colored with references to music and famous names that contribute to the sense of place, including Ann Richards, Selena, and Willie Nelson. Entries from Opal’s scrapbook are interspersed throughout. Readers will be relieved that, despite the hardships Opal and the bats must overcome, they ultimately prevail, succeeding in making friends and new homes for themselves in this celebratory primer on bats and belonging. Westell’s delicate, atmospheric illustrations greatly enhance the text.
Delightfully weird and whimsical. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9780316460583
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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