Occasional jokey dialogue won’t be enough to carry readers over a story riddled with logical gaps, extraneous characters,...
A frenetic dash across Europe that leads both to hidden treasure and the resolution of a 1,600-year-old mystery brings Newsome’s once-promising trilogy to a muddled, heavily contrived close.
Framed for the (supposed) murder of archenemy Sir Mason Green, jumped-up preteen billionaire Gerald Wilkins and his twin sidekicks Sam and Ruby are on the run. They repeatedly escape police and a beautiful poisoner while following a trail of baroque clues that take the three from an ossuary deep within Mont Saint-Michel to Grecian Delphi. This, improbably, turns out to have been secretly roofed over beneath fake ruins centuries ago to protect its fabled treasures and still-functional oracle. Newsome seems far more intent on chivvying his characters along than in setting any credible challenges for them. He pitches the trio through one chase scene or rescue after another, giving them easy access everywhere by leading them directly to a series of conveniently discovered open doors and cave entrances. All is revealed in a climactic subterranean faceoff during which the (surprise, surprise) still-living Green explains his nefarious purposes in great detail, before Gerald knocks him unconscious and expedites the death of his pet assassin.
Occasional jokey dialogue won’t be enough to carry readers over a story riddled with logical gaps, extraneous characters, massive coincidences and laboriously fabricated suspense. Illustrations not seen. (Adventure. 11-14)Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-194494-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2012
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
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American...
Crystal-clear prose poems paint a heart-rending picture of 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa’s journey from Seattle to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.
This vividly wrought story of displacement, told from Mina’s first-person perspective, begins as it did for so many Japanese-Americans: with the bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. The backlash of her Seattle community is instantaneous (“Jap, Jap, Jap, the word bounces / around the walls of the hall”), and Mina chronicles its effects on her family with a heavy heart. “I am an American, I scream / in my head, but my mouth is stuffed / with rocks; my body is a stone, like the statue / of a little Buddha Grandpa prays to.” When Roosevelt decrees that West Coast Japanese-Americans are to be imprisoned in inland camps, the Tagawas board up their house, leaving the cat, Grandpa’s roses and Mina’s best friend behind. Following the Tagawas from Washington’s Puyallup Assembly Center to Idaho’s Minidoka Relocation Center (near the titular town of Eden), the narrative continues in poems and letters. In them, injustices such as endless camp lines sit alongside even larger ones, such as the government’s asking interned young men, including Mina’s brother, to fight for America.
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American internment. (historical note) (Verse/historical fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8075-1739-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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