Two years have passed since the Carbon Diaries 2015 (2009), and Laura just wants to play punk music. With carbon rationing and the Thames flooding constantly, London’s not like it used to be. Laura and her loved ones experience drought, flood, malaria, refugee-camp internment and recurring police brutality. Refugees from global drought pour into Europe, sparking increased political power for anti-immigrant racists. But despite the novel’s grim dystopianism—hope lying only in a forward-into-the-past mentality that has Londoners planting cabbages on rooftops—Laura’s story features unexpected moral complexity. She and her friends repeatedly debate the obligations of the privileged in a world gone horribly wrong. Should they join the anti-government terrorists, march against United Front racists, live in vegan squats, feed refugees in the Sudan or just live their punk-rock student lives? It’s complicated, Laura realizes—no one answer is right. If there’s any hope in this dizzying, brilliantly drawn and terrifyingly possible near-future, it’s the ability of even selfish people to passionately throw themselves against overwhelming odds. Captivating. (Science fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: March 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2260-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A thoroughly original magical world marks this witty debut. Flora Nemain Fyrdraaca ov Fyrdraaca is not looking forward to her 14th-birthday celebration. Like everyone in her family, Flora is expected to become a soldier, but she’d rather be a ranger, casting spells and spying for her country. Her mother is always away leading the nation’s armies, her father’s been a madman since he was broken in prison during the Huitzil War and her once-great family home, Crackpot Hall, is a filthy wreck. When Flora discovers the magical Butler of Crackpot Hall, banished by her mother years before, she sees her chance to restore her home to its former glory. Of course, he doesn’t seem quite trustworthy, but does that matter if he will clean the house, do her homework and help her perform dashing rescues? Flora’s world is richly flavored with detailed costumes and the political intrigues of a war that ended before Flora was even born. Tantalizingly, the open-ended conclusion hints there might be more to come from this compelling and funny heroine. (Fantasy. 12-14)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-15-205433-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
Driven by the same agile imagination and lively wit that animated Corydon and the Island of Monsters (2006), this sequel sends goat-footed young Corydon off to Atlantis to rescue his friend, the gentle Minotaur. With a small band that includes the slain Medusa’s enigmatic son Gorgos, the bronze feathered—and sometimes featherbrained—Gorgon sisters Sthenno and Euryale and other “monsters,” Corydon undertakes a long, dangerous journey. He arrives in cultivated, technologically sophisticated Atlantis to find himself enmeshed in a web of plots spun by Hera and other malign Olympians or older deities. Though Druitt has a distracting habit of chivvying the plot along by telescoping or compressing time, so rich is his tale in ingeniously twisted mythology, punctuated by exciting, Odyssey-like encounters (capped, of course, by a truly cataclysmic climax), that readers, particularly fans of Gerald Morris’s Arthurian fantasies, will be riveted from start to finish. The author promises one more episode, set at Troy. (glossary) (Fantasy. 12-15)
Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2007
ISBN: 0-375-83383-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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