Fun and fast moving; a bright, vibrant adventure.
In this debut middle-grade novel, a girl and her talking cat must figure out why all the color has disappeared from the world.
Caitlin Maggert wakes up one day to find all the color has vanished. Her bedroom walls have turned from pink to gray. The brilliant yellow school bus is gray. Everything is gray. Caitlin’s mom doesn’t notice the change. When Caitlin brings it up with her friends—bespectacled Chinese adoptee Trudie and Tennessean Molly—it leads to a calamitous fight. Caitlin has a miserable day at school, but thankfully she isn’t totally alone in seeing the world in its new, colorless light. Her observations are confirmed by her ragdoll cat, Rio, who has started talking. Rio, in fact, has developed several extraordinary abilities, including telekinesis and suggestive mind control over feline lovers. These will come in handy when he joins Caitlin, Trudie, and Molly (now reconciled) in following a drip trail of yellow dots, tracking the missing colors to an abandoned building beyond the local dog park. What dire experiments are being conducted within? Can Rio, Caitlin, and friends thwart the schemes of the villainous MacDougal and return color to the world? In this series opener, Alexander writes in the third person, past tense, from Caitlin’s perspective or Rio’s. The prose is simple but lively, featuring plenty of short sentences to pull young readers along. The dialogue reflects the natural exuberance of schoolgirls on a quest. Caitlin is a likable protagonist—excitable and impatient but generally upbeat, choosing real friends rather than trying to be popular. Rio remains delightfully catlike in his talking form and is a fan favorite in the making. As is common in middle-grade works (and life), many of the events depicted carry disproportionate weight. Quarrels rear up from nowhere and feel like the end of the world. Making up leads to nirvana. The minor characters are similarly unshaded, although the “worst boy ever” behavior by a student named Podge does hint at a developing nuance. The story skips along in an unreserved celebration of the imagination, offering little explanation for its fantastical premises but not really needing to. Readers will take the colorless world at face value and adopt Rio into their hearts.
Fun and fast moving; a bright, vibrant adventure.Pub Date: June 11, 2022
ISBN: 979-8-98607-002-5
Page Count: 137
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Hugely entertaining, timely, and triumphant.
Robot Roz undertakes an unusual ocean journey to save her adopted island home in this third series entry.
When a poison tide flowing across the ocean threatens their island, Roz works with the resident creatures to ensure that they will have clean water, but the destruction of vegetation and crowding of habitats jeopardize everyone’s survival. Brown’s tale of environmental depredation and turmoil is by turns poignant, graceful, endearing, and inspiring, with his (mostly) gentle robot protagonist at its heart. Though Roz is different from the creatures she lives with or encounters—including her son, Brightbill the goose, and his new mate, Glimmerwing—she makes connections through her versatile communication abilities and her desire to understand and help others. When Roz accidentally discovers that the replacement body given to her by Dr. Molovo is waterproof, she sets out to seek help and discovers the human-engineered source of the toxic tide. Brown’s rich descriptions of undersea landscapes, entertaining conversations between Roz and wild creatures, and concise yet powerful explanations of the effect of the poison tide on the ecology of the island are superb. Simple, spare illustrations offer just enough glimpses of Roz and her surroundings to spark the imagination. The climactic confrontation pits oceangoing mammals, seabirds, fish, and even zooplankton against hardware and technology in a nicely choreographed battle. But it is Roz’s heroism and peacemaking that save the day.
Hugely entertaining, timely, and triumphant. (author’s note) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9780316669412
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
An absorbing fantasy centered on a resilient female protagonist facing growth, change, and self-empowerment.
In Florence’s middle-grade fantasy novel, a young girl’s heart is tested in the face of an evil, spreading Darkness.
Eleven-year-old Lydia, “freckle-cheeked and round-eyed, with hair the color of pine bark and fair skin,” is struggling with the knowledge that she has reached the age to apprentice as an herbalist. Lydia is reluctant to leave her beloved, magical Mulberry Glen and her cozy Housetree in the woods—she’ll miss Garder, the Glen’s respected philosopher; her fairy guardian Pit; her human friend Livy; and even the mischievous part-elf, part-imp, part-human twins Zale and Zamilla. But the twins go missing after hearing of a soul-sapping Darkness that has swallowed a forest and is creeping into minds and engulfing entire towns. They have secretly left to find a rare fruit that, it is said, will stop the Darkness if thrown into the heart of the mountain that rises out of the lethal forest. Lydia follows, determined to find the twins before they, too, fall victim to the Darkness. During her journey, accompanied by new friends, she gradually realizes that she herself has a dangerous role to play in the quest to stop the Darkness. In this well-crafted fantasy, Florence skillfully equates the physical manifestation of Darkness with the feelings of insecurity and powerlessness that Lydia first struggles with when thinking of leaving the Glen. Such negative thoughts grow more intrusive the closer she and her friends come to the Darkness—and to Lydia’s ultimate, powerfully rendered test of character, which leads to a satisfyingly realistic, not quite happily-ever-after ending. Highlights include a delightfully haunting, reality-shifting library and a deft sprinkling of Latin throughout the text; Pit’s pet name for Lydia is mea flosculus (“my little flower”). Fine-lined ink drawings introducing each chapter add a pleasing visual element to this well-grounded fairy tale.
An absorbing fantasy centered on a resilient female protagonist facing growth, change, and self-empowerment.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781956393095
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Waxwing Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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