Unfortunately, the artwork isn’t enough to save this book from itself
A reluctant young king escapes the confines of the palace to experience life in the surrounding city.
The boy delights in watching his subjects as they stroll through gardens and run to catch trains. He has his first taste of salt-and-vinegar chips. After a few days of wandering, penniless and sleeping in the rough, he decides to return home. But a man offers him some advice: “You grow up and become a man when you begin to put other people before yourself.” With that, the young king renames himself John, volunteers at a soup kitchen, and searches for meaning in his life. But what’s truly revealed in this second book of a trilogy that began with The Invisible Kingdom (2016) is that Ryan is far more accomplished as a visual artist than as a writer. The large-format book is gorgeously designed and illustrated with a mixture of the cut paper and screen printing that the British artist is known for. But the overlong text meanders through a meaningless plot cluttered with inane platitudes: “I never realised that life could feel as sweet as this”; “What a world!” Readers might be excused for skipping the text altogether just to thumb through the pages of matte-finished, heavy stock paper to appreciate the subtle coloring and shifting perspectives that capture city life. The king and other humans are depicted as silhouette cutouts, giving few clues to race or ethnicity, but his hair is straight.
Unfortunately, the artwork isn’t enough to save this book from itself . (Illustrated fiction. 13 & up)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56656-063-4
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Crocodile/Interlink
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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