None
When Finn is selected as the model for a holographic guide in the Magic Kingdom, he never imagines it will pit him against the evil forces plotting to destroy Disney World. Along with the four other teens who act as Disney’s holographic hosts, Finn appears in the Magic Kingdom in his dreams. There, an old Disney Imagineer tells the five they have been specially selected to save Disney World. The evil forces of the Overtakers—Disney’s villains, led by the witch Maleficent of Sleeping Beauty—are coming to life to destroy first the Magic Kingdom, and then the world. Luckily, Walt Disney wrote a riddle long ago that can be solved to defeat the Overtakers. As they study the puzzle, the heroes battle witchcraft and living animatronics in the theme park’s after-hours. Though the adventure makes cunning use of Disney’s mythos—a scene in which the “It’s a Small World” dolls attack the adventurers while singing their famous song is chilling—flat characters and an anticlimactic finale detract from the cleverness. (Fantasy. 11-13)
None NonePub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-7868-5444-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2005
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Low in physical violence, while being rich in moral and ethical issues, as well as in appealingly complex characters and...
Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-316-05777-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Megan Tingley/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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