A satisfying adventure for young readers, bucking fantasy trends in current Potter-obsessed lit to winning effect. (Fiction....
Four children bond over multiple mysteries in this historical adventure for preteens.
It’s 1866, and young Emma Green has moved with her family–including her ex-Navy Civil War hero father–to remote Point Bonita, a lighthouse post overlooking San Francisco Bay. Lonely and isolated at first, she’s also confused as to why the move was necessary and why her father seems ashamed of his role in the war. Emma soon meets other children–Harris, the son of a rancher, and Sue, the granddaughter of the ranch’s oldest worker–and they play at solving mysteries every day. Things turn serious when a boat washes into the cove, with raving, feverish boy Rascal Pratt inside. Rascal claims to be an infamous pirate, but his real origins are intertwined in the narrative with the stories of Sue’s grandfather ranch-hand Achilles, a Native American seeking his freedom, and the mystery of long-lost buccaneer treasure. Achilles is blind and unable to find the alleged long-lost booty of Sir Francis Drake that would let him buy his way out of bondage. Instead, he entrusts Rascal to find it for him. Rascal, initially distrustful of the other children, is forced to bond with them to find it and to secure his own freedom once his true origins are revealed. Scott’s tale manages to deftly tie together all these threads, incorporating a generous amount of historical detail and educational footnotes about different types of boats, vegetation and other trivia along the way. Scott generally avoids talking down to young readers, avoiding preachiness while exploring bigotry and military culture in America’s post-Civil War past.
A satisfying adventure for young readers, bucking fantasy trends in current Potter-obsessed lit to winning effect. (Fiction. YA)Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-60402-519-4
Page Count: 207
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Laymon moves us dazzlingly (and sometimes bewilderingly) from 1964 to 1985 to 2013 and incorporates themes of prejudice,...
A novel within a novel—hilarious, moving and occasionally dizzying.
Citoyen “City” Coldson is a 14-year-old wunderkind when it comes to crafting sentences. In fact, his only rival is his classmate LaVander Peeler. Although the two don’t get along, they’ve qualified to appear on the national finals of the contest "Can You Use That Word in a Sentence," and each is determined to win. Unfortunately, on the nationally televised show, City is given the word “niggardly” and, to say the least, does not provide a “correct, appropriate or dynamic usage” of the word as the rules require. LaVander similarly blows his chance with the word “chitterlings,” so both are humiliated, City the more so since his appearance is available to all on YouTube. This leads to a confrontation with his grandmother, alas for City, “the greatest whupper in the history of Mississippi whuppings.” Meanwhile, the principal at City’s school has given him a book entitled Long Division. When City begins to read this, he discovers that the main character is named City Coldson, and he’s in love with a Shalaya Crump...but this is in 1985, and the contest finals occurred in 2013. (Laymon is nothing if not contemporary.) A girl named Baize Shephard also appears in the novel City is reading, though in 2013, she has mysteriously disappeared a few weeks before City’s humiliation. Laymon cleverly interweaves his narrative threads and connects characters in surprising and seemingly impossible ways.
Laymon moves us dazzlingly (and sometimes bewilderingly) from 1964 to 1985 to 2013 and incorporates themes of prejudice, confusion and love rooted in an emphatically post-Katrina world.Pub Date: June 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-932841-72-5
Page Count: 250
Publisher: Bolden/Agate
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Thoroughbreds and Virginia blue-bloods cavort, commit murder, and fall in love in Roberts's (Hidden Riches, 1994, etc.) latest romantic thriller — this one set in the world of championship horse racing. Rich, sheltered Kelsey Byden is recovering from a recent divorce when she receives a letter from her mother, Naomi, a woman she has believed dead for over 20 years. When Kelsey confronts her genteel English professor father, though, he sheepishly confesses that, no, her mother isn't dead; throughout Kelsey's childhood, she was doing time for the murder of her lover. Kelsey meets with Naomi and not only finds her quite charming, but the owner of Three Willows, one of the most splendid horse farms in Virginia. Kelsey is further intrigued when she meets Gabe Slater, a blue-eyed gambling man who owns a neighboring horse farm; when one of Gabe's horses is mated with Naomi's, nostrils flare, flanks quiver, and the romance is on. Since both Naomi and Gabe have horses entered in the Kentucky Derby, Kelsey is soon swept into the whirlwind of the Triple Crown, in spite of her family's objections to her reconciliation with the notorious Naomi. The rivalry between the two horse farms remains friendly, but other competitors — one of them is Gabe's father, a vicious alcoholic who resents his son's success — prove less scrupulous. Bodies, horse and human, start piling up, just as Kelsey decides to investigate the murky details of her mother's crime. Is it possible she was framed? The ground is thick with no-goods, including haughty patricians, disgruntled grooms, and jockeys with tragic pasts, but despite all the distractions, the identity of the true culprit behind the mayhem — past and present — remains fairly obvious. The plot lopes rather than races to the finish. Gambling metaphors abound, and sexual doings have a distinctly equine tone. But Roberts's style has a fresh, contemporary snap that gets the story past its own worst excesses.
Pub Date: June 13, 1995
ISBN: 0-399-14059-X
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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