A time-traveling romp.
A pandemic breaks out in the northeast of England and the solution involves time travel.
Eleven-year-old Georgina Santos has always longed for a dog. Shaggy mutt Mr. Mash steals her heart, but unfortunately, the twosome can only meet during Georgie’s volunteer shifts at St. Woof’s shelter. On a beach outing with the shelter dogs, Georgie and her best friend, Ramzy Rahman, meet eccentric game developer Dr. Emilia Pretorius. The fortuitous run-in leads to the pair’s unwittingly participating in Dr. Pretorius’ greatest work, the Big Experiment, testing her multisensory virtual-reality environments. When Georgie’s oversight in hygiene protocols at St. Woof’s leads to the spread of canine-borne Ebola, Dr. Pretorius’ Big Experiment might just be the key to ending the pandemic. Adventures ensue as Georgie and her pals race to retrieve a cure. Welford presents a fast-paced, female-driven STEM adventure in which short chapters that jump back and forth through time keep the plot moving, teasing the story of how everything came to be and keeping readers in suspense. Georgie has dark curly hair and light brown eyes; Ramzy comes from an unnamed war-torn country that no longer exists. Dr. Pretorius is a Black woman whose Afro is commented upon frequently, and her blue eyes cause Georgie to stare and squeak in surprise—a treatment that feels othering. The initial spread of the disease from a Chinese family to a shelter dog may not land well in the current environment.
A time-traveling romp. (Science fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Dec. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-70748-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Budding heroes defeat class and gender expectations as well as the occasional monster in this wry outing.
Thinking that it’s better to be fake knights than real peasants, Tim and his best buddy, Belinda, sign up to rescue a captured princess.
Unaware that they’ve been snookered into a dastardly scheme, the two youngsters hear that Princess Grace from the next kingdom over has been carried off in the claws of a fearsome and funky “stinx” and volunteer to accompany (reputedly) brave and noble Prince Ruprecht and his (reputedly) powerful magician Nerlim on a rescue mission. Accompanied by village idiot Ferkle, whose habit of shoving mud in his pants effectively lowers the level of humor even further, the two ersatz knights weather the Forest of Doom, the River of Doom, and a “troll bridge” across the Chasm of Doom despite a suspicious lack of assistance from either the prince or the magician…and arrive to discover that neither the stinx nor the princess is quite as expected either. In fact, the princess ends up being the rescuer (“That’s what you call irony,” she comments) when Ruprecht and Nerlim announce their intention to seize her and do away with any inconvenient witnesses. Tim and Belinda are rewarded with promotions for their efforts; readers will come away with both a cogent warning from Gibbs about the dangers of falling for fake news and better vocabularies due to his penchant for flagging significant words like gullible and malodorous in the narrative and then pausing to define and use them in sample sentences. Along with a full-spread map, Curtis supplies frequent pen-and-ink sketches of the cast in comical poses and straits. The races and ethnicities of the characters are not specified in the text, though cover art depicts characters of various skin tones.
Budding heroes defeat class and gender expectations as well as the occasional monster in this wry outing. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: March 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-9925-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Imaginative, fast-paced, and fun.
Character Indira Story lives in the fictional town of Origin and aspires to a plot of her own.
She works hard to make her dream come true: to travel to the city of Fable and attend Protagonist Preparatory, a school where famous characters such as Alice (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), Fitzwilliam Darcy, and Romeo Montague train aspirants to become successful characters in actual stories. Ultimately, succeeding at Protagonist Preparatory would result in Indira’s being chosen by an Author in the Real World for their novel. Indira is determined to become a protagonist so that she can find her brother, David, a laborer in the town of Quiver, where he mines story nuggets. However, Indira fails her audition and begins to train as a side character. To make matters worse, her best efforts at school are sabotaged, and Fable itself is threatened. The question arises: Can a side character become a hero? Reintgen’s middle-grade debut is at once a fantastic adventure and a tribute to famous and popular literature. The plot feels rushed at times, but witty references—to literary characters and elements of the act of reading itself, like dog ears (envisioned as one-eared dogs who steal watches from anthropomorphic bookmarks)—make this novel enjoyable and laugh-out-loud funny. There is nothing intrinsically Indian about brown-skinned Indira (as her name suggests but as her equally brown-skinned brother’s does not), but her-far-from positive experiences remind readers of the importance of working hard at their own stories.
Imaginative, fast-paced, and fun. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-525-64668-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
