A highly original, well-illustrated fairy tale/horror story.
In Thomas’ (Fenlick Whiskbur, 2019, etc.) middle-grade series starter, a girl with a strange ability must complete a mission in a twisted and dangerous fantasy realm.
On her 12th birthday, Cricket Kane expects her dad, as always, to give her one gift from him and another that represents her mom, who died the day that Cricket was born. This year, however, he’s oddly reluctant to give her the second gift. It’s a journal that her mother kept from ages 8 to 13, and it contains her mom’s notes about seeing the same kinds of visions that Cricket does: strange trails of colored dust, wafting around people and things. Her mother, however, thought that the dust had “magical properties” and that “tooth fairies” and their leader, “the santa,” knew more about it. This may sound like a somewhat juvenile premise for the book’s middle school target audience, but Thomas provides a fairy-tale twist that’s as audacious as it is inventive—and a mite horrific, to boot. Under the santa’s direction, a spiderlike tooth fairy kidnaps Cricket’s baby brother. Only the girl can see the true appearance of the monstrous “slugwump” that the fairy left in the child’s place; the creature infects people with corrupting black dust, which turns them against Cricket. A catlike “cattawisp” confirms to her that “The santa you think you know is not the santa who is.” To rescue her brother, Cricket must travel to the source of the evil: Aeryland, formerly called “Fairyland.” Along the way, she faces danger, injury, and betrayal as she tries to master her own dust-driven powers. Thomas’ dark fantasyland is a page-turner that’s teeming with unusual creatures such as tooth fairies, aka “gibber snatches”; bloodsucking “hematoads”; ticklish “critterpuffs”; needle-toothed “buttersprites”; giant mountain rabbits; ghastly “gargolems” that turn living things to stone; and the aforementioned slugwumps, which are significant to the plot’s outcome. Debut artist Loeblich offers beautiful black-and-white pen-and-ink illustrations, which are set in delicate oval frames on textless pages; Cricket and her dad are shown as dark skinned; her stepmother and best friend appear white. The images also capture the strange landscapes and creepy creatures in intricate detail.
A highly original, well-illustrated fairy tale/horror story.Pub Date: April 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-951406-06-6
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Ichigo Black Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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