Despite a few rough edges, a promising start.
An escalating war unites a ragamuffin with a secret and two fugitives with secrets of their own in this steampunk-tinged opener.
Having herself spent three years in disguise as a news “boy,” orphan Lavender Blue is willing to accept Jack Jingle, a brilliant but distracted inventor, and the oddly clicking, heavily muffled figure Crow as friends without probing into their pasts. Ultimately those pasts come home to roost, though, with revelations that Jack has built a flying war machine and Crow is its reluctant but purpose-built mechanical pilot. An escape attempt ends in a crash, separating it from the main characters and setting up the next volume in the series. Xu creates a nicely realistic 1920s-style setting for events and spaces out her panels to make the action reasonably easy to follow. Her manga-influenced figures, though, display only a limited range of expressions, most of them more exaggerated than called for by the circumstances, and many of the story’s twists are thoroughly telegraphed. Confusingly, the blue-eyed, light-skinned child is tagged as “mixed” (i.e., part Grimmaean) and therefore suspicious for her light hair, while Jack, with similar coloring, is accepted without comment. By and large, characters display a range of skin tones, from dark brown to white.
Despite a few rough edges, a promising start. (Graphic science fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-545-80311-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Graphix/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Further misadventures with cool tech—and, for extra bite, bear-sharks.
A mysterious wave of attacks forces the 11-year-old creator of the titular device to, literally, think outside the box.
Though bright enough to leave his miniature talking monkey, Phil, at home, Tim decides to let the Imagination Box do his schoolwork—only to have mild guilt transformed to shock when the invention is stolen by a seemingly hypnotized crossing guard. When he turns for help to the Technology, Research, and Defense Agency, a secret techno-spy agency, boy, monkey, and sidekick Dee are swept into a whirl of deception and betrayal orchestrated by the murderous owner of another device that can control people’s minds through their cellphones. Shoveling in further plot-accelerating gadgetry ranging from a disintegrating ray to golf ball–like teleporters, Ford propels his all-white (or simian) cast to a magnificent climax featuring fire-breathing bear-sharks (the result of too much imagining with too little forethought) and a villain who obligingly explains his machinations at length into a microphone. Except for Phil, who suffers an outsized existential crisis, the characters don’t jump off the page the way they did in the 2016 opener. Still, events trot along smartly, and Tim undergoes a personal transformation that not only saves this day, but to judge from a closing twist, others to come.
Further misadventures with cool tech—and, for extra bite, bear-sharks. (Science fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-93631-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Cole pitches some entertaining notions but proves weak on follow-through.
Four young people test a new, high-tech amusement park ride that tests them in turn.
In openly admitted homage to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Cole brings together a quartet of (supposed) contest winners to take the titular machine on an inaugural ride. Outfitting them in special body suits (“We’re going to look like Oompa-Loompas”), he subjects them to a barrage of hazards ranging from a stampede of miniature moose to a cleaver-wielding actor specializing in psychopathic murderers and murderous robots. But although it’s all the product of an advanced form of virtual reality that is supposed to incorporate each player’s distinctive fears, most of the terrors encountered (aside from the moose) are generic horror-show fare. The four preteens—two white, one “dark-skinned,” one “olive”—make up a like muddle: Cameron is a motor-mouthed brainiac (with a fetching habit of unconsciously stripping to his underwear when deep in thought), Nika and Trevor are afflicted with medical conditions that leave them, respectively, incapable of feeling any physical pain or fear, and in an odd bit of genre miscasting, Devin is clairvoyant. Moreover, the author himself seems unsure where the VR ends and the other sort resumes; the robots, for instance, seem to exist in both.
Cole pitches some entertaining notions but proves weak on follow-through. (Science fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-55282-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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