An enchanting fantasy for middle-grade readers who like a touch of magic in their fiction.
A preteen girl learns about what’s valuable in life—and what’s not—after discovering a magical secondhand shop in her small town in the Midwest.
In the second middle-grade novel by the author of Monsterville (2016), 11-year-old Anna lives in Longford, an ordinary town in Illinois, in 1956. Anna thinks that she’s ordinary, too—not sporty like her brother or academic like her sister. But Anna is happy. She has a wild imagination, a great best friend, Carrie, and is known and liked by the adults in town. When she stumbles upon an otherworldly bric-a-brac shop on Main Street, it seems that life can only get better. The shop’s proprietors—lovely old Ruth and her grumpy husband, Vernon—call themselves “keepers.” They look after the magic of the world, and use a magic mirror to discern what their customers most desire. Best of all, Anna has the same gift. She, too, can see what the mirror shows. The shop makes Anna feel special, and she starts working there after school and brings in lots of new customers. But for all the good she does—for all that she makes lives better—some of the changes affect Longford in a less positive way. The magic that solves people’s problems takes something in return. Anna’s obsession with the shop places a strain on her friendship with Carrie. And the shop has a no-returns policy. While Anna’s dreams are coming true, it becomes clear that she needs to careful what she wishes for—a reality that makes this a delightful, safe adventure with insidious dark edges. The 1950s setting adds both a point of difference and a slightly dreamlike quality to the tale. Reida’s minor characters are well drawn and all have roles to play. The dialogue is natural. The prose is simple but polished, drawing readers faster and faster into the unfolding scenario. Given how neatly the plot is structured and how naturally it is traversed, the novel ends rather abruptly—but Anna has a vitality and effervescence that will have staying power for young readers.
An enchanting fantasy for middle-grade readers who like a touch of magic in their fiction.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-7348170-1-0
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Warrior Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An enthralling fantasy debut exploring exploitation by those in power.
Will 12-year-old Nura be able to outsmart the trickster jinn and save herself and her friends?
Nura lives in the fictional Pakistani town of Meerabagh, where she has worked mining mica to help support her family of five—her mother, herself, and her three younger siblings—since her father’s death. In the mines she has the company of her best friend, Faisal, who is teased by other kids for his stutter, and she enjoys small pleasures like splurging on gulab jamun. Although Maa wants Nura to stop working and attend school, she has no interest in classroom learning and hopes to save up to send her younger siblings to school instead so they can break the family’s cycle of poverty. Following a mining accident in which Faisal and others are lost in the rubble, Nura goes to the rescue. In her quest, she is plunged into the magical, glittering jinn realm, where nothing is as it seems. The author seamlessly weaves into the worldbuilding of the story commentary on real-life problems such as the ravages of child labor and systems that perpetuate inequities. An informative author’s note further explores present-day global cycles of oppression as well as the life-changing power of education. This action-packed story set in a Muslim community moves at a fast pace, with evocative writing that brings the fantasy world to life and lyrical imagery to describe emotions.
An enthralling fantasy debut exploring exploitation by those in power. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5795-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
A vibrant celebration of art’s power to console and heal.
Zora, 12, shares her mother’s artistic gifts, but when grief and guilt lead her to destroy years of drawings, the results are astonishing.
Voom is Zora and her mom’s word for the artistic impulse that bubbles up inside. After disclosing her leukemia diagnosis to Zora and her sister, Frankie, Mom promised the girls she’d beat it. Ten months later, their far sicker mom is hospitalized in Pittsburgh, where the girls share their bus driver grandmother’s basement apartment. Mom continues to be optimistic and avoid acknowledging the possibility of death. Frustrated and needing to hear a realistic prognosis, Zora uses her art to show her mother the truth of how ill she looks. Later that night her mom dies—and Zora’s Voom goes away. When Grandma Wren disappoints Frankie on her seventh birthday, Zora’s guilt-fueled anger erupts. Over Frankie’s protests, Zora scribbles out her drawings until the scribbles fight back, pulling the girls into Pencilvania, a world where each of Zora’s creations lives. Most of her now-animated drawings welcome her—except for one scribbled-out horse who kidnaps Frankie. Guided by a seven-legged horse, the Zoracle (a composite of her early self-portraits), and other charming creations, Zora sets out to rescue Frankie and rediscover the wellspring of creativity that forms her mother’s legacy. Presumed White, the humans are well rounded and believable. Pencilvania’s inhabitants, conceived with humorous, metafictional whimsy, are enlivened with copious, inventive illustrations.
A vibrant celebration of art’s power to console and heal. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-72821-590-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
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