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
Cheerfully engaging.
From Australian Moriarty (The Last Anniversary, 2006, etc.), domestic escapism about a woman whose temporary amnesia makes her re-examine what really matters to her.
Alice wakes from what she thinks is a dream, assuming she is a recently married 29-year-old expecting her first child. Actually she is 39, the mother of three and in the middle of an acrimonious custody battle with her soon-to-be ex-husband Nick. She’s fallen off her exercise bike, and the resulting bump on her head has not only erased her memory of the last 10 years but has also taken her psychologically back to a younger, more easygoing self at odds with the woman she gathers she has become. While Alice-at-29 is loving and playful if lacking ambition or self-confidence, Alice-at-39 is a highly efficient if too tightly wound supermom. She is also thin and rich since Nick now heads the company where she remembers him struggling in an entry-level position. Alice-at-29 cannot conceive that she and Nick would no longer be rapturously in love or that she and her adored older sister Elisabeth could be estranged, and she is shocked that her shy mother has married Nick’s bumptious father and taken up salsa dancing. She neither remembers nor recognizes her three children, each given a distinct if slightly too cute personality. Nor does she know what to make of the perfectly nice boyfriend Alice-at-39 has acquired. As memory gradually returns, Alice-at-29 initially misinterprets the scattered images and flashes of emotion, especially those concerning Gina, a woman who evidently caused the rift with Nick. Alice-at-29 assumes Gina was Nick’s mistress, only to discover that Gina was her best friend. Gina died in a freak car accident and in her honor, Alice-at-39 has organized mothers from the kids’ school to bake the largest lemon meringue pie on record. But Alice-at-29 senses that Gina may not have been a completely positive influence. Moriarty handles the two Alice consciousnesses with finesse and also delves into infertility issues through Elizabeth’s diary.
Cheerfully engaging.Pub Date: June 2, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-15718-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
More of a detour than a natural progression for the author, whose fans will nevertheless find this as engaging as it is...
One of America’s finest fiction writers returns with an audaciously allegorical novella about sleep deprivation in an age of sensory overload.
As a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the author of a critically acclaimed novel (Vampires in the Lemon Grove, 2013, etc.) and two story collections, Russell seems to be having some fun here, using the novella form and e-book format to put creative ingenuity to Orwellian use. The year is sometime in the near future, when the omnipresence of communication and connecting devices, the 24-hour news cycle and other sources of overstimulation have turned insomnia into an epidemic, even a plague. Sleep donors (like blood or plasma donors) can be a godsend for those suffering, particularly if those donors sleep undisturbed, without nightmares, like a baby. In this novella, Baby A is the ultimate donor, the silver bullet, the one whose sleep has universal benefits. (Other donors need to be more closely matched, as with blood types.) Our narrator, Trish, has recruited Baby A through the child’s parents and effectively sells the donor program to them by invoking the death of her own sister due to sleep deprivation. But the demands on Baby A eventually frustrate her father—a more reluctant participant than his wife—and he feels more concerned with what Baby A might suffer than with the benefits for society at large. At the other extreme from Baby A is Donor Y, whose nightmare-infected donation (an act of terrorism? an accident?) ultimately causes an international crisis, with many preferring the suicide of sleeplessness to a sleep that returns them to this nightmare. As the plot progresses, Trish feels that both she and Baby A have perhaps been equally exploited. Those who appreciate Russell’s literary alchemy might find this a little too close to science fiction, but it serves as a parable on a number of levels for a world that is recognizably our own.
More of a detour than a natural progression for the author, whose fans will nevertheless find this as engaging as it is provocative.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-937894-28-3
Page Count: 101
Publisher: Atavist Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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