The sweet and sour of immortality infuses a heady, heartbreaking, occasionally humorous tale.
When one’s permanently stuck at age 11, living forever can lose its appeal.
Being one of the legendary “Neverdead” thanks to a magic potion, Alve (aka “Alfie”) has spent the past millennium or so with his equally immortal mom and cat, just getting by and keeping out of sight. What has become increasingly difficult in today’s Britain turns impossible when, tragically, his mother is killed (they are not invulnerable) in a house fire—leaving him injured, traumatized, and all too exposed to local police and social services. Fortunately, there’s an antidote to the potion. Unfortunately, he’s outwardly 11 (albeit polylingual, classically educated, and well versed in 17th-century fighting techniques) and owns nothing except a rescued trunk of autographed Dickens first editions. Welford gives his world-weary protagonist several resourceful allies led by Roxy Minto, a young neighbor of West Indian descent with a big personality, and her naïve but game sidekick, Aidan (who, like Alve, presents as white and who shares narration duties with him). Alve not only has to cope with modern life and elude civil authorities, but also to evade a brutal adversary who’s been after the antidote for centuries. If readers find themselves wishing for more than tantalizing glimpses of Alve’s experiences in earlier centuries, his immediate plight is absorbing, as sharply felt as both the weight of all those years and the shining promise of being able to grow up at last.
The sweet and sour of immortality infuses a heady, heartbreaking, occasionally humorous tale. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-70745-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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