by Ryan Cowan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 17, 2019
A tale with plenty of spooky trappings and valuable lessons for young people.
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In this debut middle-grade adventure, a young witch learns the value of teamwork and sacrifice from his favorite teacher.
Elliott Keene is a third grader in the small, nonmagical town of Wolf’s End. His parents, Greta and Christian, are witches from a magical place called Moonstone. They all live in the ordinary, human world under orders from Enchantra, Moonstone’s ruler, so that they can protect average people from magical harm. Sloan Moonbeam, another guardian witch, is Elliott’s teacher. He begins to suspect that Elliott is psychic, and he warns the boy that he must keep his powers secret, even from his best friend, Lucas. Elliott’s life grows more complicated when Mr. Moonbeam and his parents learn from Syballine, another guardian, that Noir, ruler of Moonstone’s Dark Lands, is hunting for the Halloween crystal—an artifact that would allow him to unleash a horde of monsters and potentially rule both Moonstone and the nonmagical world. Thankfully, Noir can’t enter Wolf’s End, but he has his sights set on kidnapping Syballine’s talented daughter, Sabrina. Mr. Moonbeam takes Sabrina into his care, placing her in his classroom, while the guardians hide the Halloween Crystal. Greta looks into the crystal and sees the Mossy Mansion on Rose Hill, so the magicians go there on a mission—but they seem to encounter Noir’s agents at every turn. Cowan’s middle-grade fantasy celebrates Halloween as both a colorful holiday and as a spiritual event; indeed, the plot revolves around stopping Noir on that night—a time when the “veil between the two worlds is paper thin.” Sabrina is a well-developed, egocentric character who notes that, “I’ve always gotten everything I’ve ever wanted.” But later, when Elliott complains about being an imperfect witch, his teacher says, “Nothing worthwhile comes easy,” a statement that remains valid beyond childhood. Cowan also engagingly reveres the seasons—especially fall: “Life is nature and nature is life.” A dazzling, creature-filled finale leaves possibilities open for further adventures.
A tale with plenty of spooky trappings and valuable lessons for young people.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-795277-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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