A charming, imaginative book; perfect for preteen fans of fantasy.
Goodell and Bright’s debut middle-grade novel maps the enchanting land of Bespri, a parallel world brimming with magic, richly portrayed characters and impending danger.
Despite living comfortably with his guardian, Ben grows restless in his adolescence; he wants information about his presumably dead parents. His guardian, the Professor, refuses to answer any questions about them, and Ben finds even less information elsewhere. Goodell and Bright create a likable character in Ben, capturing well a teenage boy’s contradictory emotional turmoil. When he first sees an eerie apparition of a woman who strongly resembles his mother, he reasons “that his subconscious was creating hallucinations to push him into learning the truth.” The ghost appears again and stabs Ben with a dagger that leaves no physical mark, and he impulsively pursues the spirit “to find that ghost—or whatever she was—and find out what was going on.” Instead of the apparition, he encounters Mizli, a beautiful girl his age, who came to rescue him from the very woman he was chasing. It turns out the woman is not a spirit but a Feyren warrior, serving a calculating, charismatic emperor who has ordered Ben’s capture. Mizli’s escape plans are foiled, and Ben is captured. Mizli then rushes home for reinforcements, using a technique called “longstepping.” Such magical revelations not only create a mesmerizing fantasy world but are also interspersed to allow proper absorption from one enchantment before building to the next. Explanations of these revelations occasionally slows the momentum. Once Ben arrives at the emperor’s palace, it becomes apparent that Goodell and Bright have relied on the overused trope of the singular, outside savior with a minor twist: Ben has help from an unexpected corner. Fortunately, the story pulls back from this literary device enough to create a more satisfying and original ending.
A charming, imaginative book; perfect for preteen fans of fantasy.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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