A story held back by a plethora of similarities to the Potter world, though it has plenty of shine on its own.
Henshon’s debut novel treads familiar ground, pitting an orphan and two friends against forces beyond their ken.
Andy Lightfoot shares his parents’ zest for time travel—a predilection that distresses his grandmother to no end because, when Andy was 5 years old, both his parents vanished mysteriously, lost in time. Sent to live with his grandparents, Andy wavers between deference to his grandmother’s wishes and a quiet sort of defiance, which soon has him creating his own time shuttle as a science fair project. With gentle encouragement from his more adventurous grandfather, Andy works up the courage to apply to the Jules Verne Time Travel Summer School—the same summer camp his parents attended before vanishing. What follows isn’t entirely a retread of Harry Potter’s first adventures at Hogwarts, but there are enough similarities to be distracting. Andy becomes fast friends with two other students, a boy and a girl, and goes shopping for school supplies with a guide before departing via an unorthodox mode of transportation. He’s placed on one of his new school’s four teams. He attracts the headmaster’s attention. And of course, Andy and his friends enjoy adventures far out of their depth, from battling a dinosaur on the school grounds to his first real experience with time travel. Clearing the air a bit is a blatant shoutout to the Harry Potter books: “They were a big hit forty years ago,” observes one of Andy’s new friends. But Henshon’s story is at its best when it diverges from the Potter model and focuses on relationships—especially the one between Andy and his grandfather, who, unlike his wife, is equal parts wise, adventurous, and tolerant. “I can’t tell you what to do, because I don’t have to live with the decision,” Grandpa Lightfoot reassures Andy when the young man wonders whether he’s really cut out to pursue his time-travel dream. “I’m sure you’ll do the right thing.”
A story held back by a plethora of similarities to the Potter world, though it has plenty of shine on its own.Pub Date: Dec. 16, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 221
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2015
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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