In a patchy pirate yarn rigged with historical people and incidents, Moore (My Life with the Indians, not reviewed, etc.) puts a teenage stowaway aboard an 18th-century pirate chaser. Raised in the strict Philadelphia Quaker household of his Uncle Elias, David steals off to sea while Elias himself is away on a supposed trading venture, and finds himself aboard The Sea Turtle, a refitted merchant ship commissioned to track down brutal, wily buccaneer Jack Scarfield. A trail of burning ships and murdered men leads to a climactic battle, in the course of which David is shocked to learn that Scarfield and Elias are one, a freebooter who assuages his Quaker conscience by buying and freeing slaves to crew his ship, but then steals the money back. Though Moore opens with a melodramatic hanging, he takes a long time to get David off shore, and leaves the complex, potentially fascinating character of Elias/Scarfield, a figure based on a real brigand who led a double life, largely unexamined. Violent encounters are compellingly related, but readers with a taste for salt breezes and nonstop action will find this slow and flavorless next to such blood-and-thunder tales as Iain Lawrence’s Buccaneers (2001) or Gerald Hausman’s Tom Cringle series. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: June 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-380-97877-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
This weave of perceptive, well-told tales wears its agenda with unusual grace.
Two young people of different generations get profound lessons in the tragic, enduring legacy of war.
Raised on the thrilling yarns of his great-grandpa Jacob and obsessed with both World War II and first-person–shooter video games, Trevor is eager to join the 93-year-old vet when he is invited to revisit the French town his unit had helped to liberate. In alternating chapters, the overseas trip retraces the parallel journeys of two young people—Trevor, 12, and Jacob, in 1944, just five years older—with similarly idealized visions of what war is like as they travel both then and now from Fort Benning to Omaha Beach and then through Normandy. Jacob’s wartime experiences are an absorbing whirl of hard fighting, sudden death, and courageous acts spurred by necessity…but the modern trip turns suspenseful too, as mysterious stalkers leave unsettling tokens and a series of hostile online posts that hint that Jacob doesn’t have just German blood on his hands. Korman acknowledges the widely held view of World War II as a just war but makes his own sympathies plain by repeatedly pointing to the unavoidable price of conflict: “Wars may have winning sides, but everybody loses.” Readers anticipating a heavy-handed moral will appreciate that Trevor arrives at a refreshingly realistic appreciation of video games’ pleasures and limitations. As his dad puts it: “War makes a better video game….But if you’re looking for a way to live, I’ll take peace every time.”
This weave of perceptive, well-told tales wears its agenda with unusual grace. (Fiction/historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-29020-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Like its bestselling progenitors, a nonstop spinoff afroth with high tech, spectacular magic, and silly business.
With their big brother Artemis off to Mars, 11-year-old twins Myles and Beckett are swept up in a brangle with murderous humans and even more dangerous magical creatures.
Unsurprisingly, the fraternal Irish twins ultimately prove equal to the challenge—albeit with help from, Colfer as omniscient narrator admits early on, a “hugely improbable finale.” Following the coincidental arrival on their island estate of two denizens of the subterranean fairy realm in the persons of a tiny but fearsome troll and a “hybrid” pixie-elf, or “pixel,” police trainee, the youngest Fowls immediately find themselves in the sights of both Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, a ruthless aristocrat out to bag said troll for its immorality-conferring venom, and Sister Jeronima Gonzalez-Ramos de Zárate, black-ops “nunterrogation” and knife specialist for ACRONYM, an intergovernmental fairy-monitoring organization. Amid the ensuing whirl of captures, escapes, trickery, treachery, and gunfire (none of which proves fatal…or at least not permanently), the twins leverage their complementary differences to foil and exasperate both foes: Myles being an Artemis mini-me who has dressed in black suits since infancy and loves coming up with and then “Fowlsplaining” his genius-level schemes; and Beckett, ever eager to plunge into reckless action and nearly nonverbal in English but with an extraordinary gift for nonhuman tongues. In the end they emerge triumphant, though threatened with mind wipe if they ever interfere in fairy affairs again. Yeah, right. Human characters seem to be default white; “hybrid” is used to describe nonhuman characters of mixed heritage.
Like its bestselling progenitors, a nonstop spinoff afroth with high tech, spectacular magic, and silly business. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-368-04375-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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