An eminently satisfying closer to a thoughtful, complex, and very funny adventure series.
In the third installment of DasGupta’s bestselling series, 12-year-old demon slayer Kiranmala and her friends must stop her father, the Serpent King, from collapsing the parallel dimensions of the multiverse into one in a nefarious plot to destroy its diversity.
Having saved Prince Neelkamal from her father at the end of Game of Stars (2019), Kiran must now save Prince Lalkamal, Neel’s brother, trapped in a New Jersey tree. But as Kiran traverses the multiverse, things get strange(r): When her auto-rickshaw collides with a pumpkin, the old woman who tumbles out turns from the woman from a well-loved folktale into the story’s ferocious tiger. The “story-smushing thing” keeps happening, and when a wormhole lands Kiran back in New Jersey, she returns to parents who are “colonized beyond repair”—they keep referring to her as “Karen” and rejecting her bicultural Bengali American identity. In line with its predecessors, this adventure is characteristically action-packed and funny: DasGupta riddles the text with in-jokes and puns, and her verbal gymnastics are wink-winks to readers who are fluent in Bengali or Hindi and/or familiar with South Asian culture. But this book is also the most ambitious of the trilogy. Not only does it draw inspiration from Bengali folklore, South Asian and American pop culture, and metaphysics, it also reinforces seamlessly and with righteousness the series’ central themes: that stories are powerful, and that many stories are necessary to imagine a just future.
An eminently satisfying closer to a thoughtful, complex, and very funny adventure series. (Fantasy. 10-14)Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-35589-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
Another solid adventure that doesn’t reinvent the wheel but spins it quite well.
The spy kids return for another Spy School adventure.
By now, the students at the CIA’s Academy of Espionage have had multiple exciting encounters with the villainous organization that calls itself SPYDER. The CIA is keen to take advantage of an offer made to them by disgraced ex-spy Murray Hill, a captured SPYDER teen agent. Narrator and agent Ben Ripley, 13, and his partner, Erica Hale, 15, are the only agents Murray will lead to SPYDER’s secret headquarters, so the duo reluctantly follows the traitor’s lead while their fellow students Mike Brezinski and Zoe Zibbell stow away. Things go south quickly, and soon the group is stuck in a strange land with no backup. At this point in the series fans know what they’re getting, and Gibbs doesn’t disappoint. The dialogue crackles, the schemes are clever, and the plotting is tight and efficient. Gibbs doesn’t divulge any of the character’s ethnicities, leaving room for interpretation in a key moment that is gracefully organic to the narrative. The book’s finale leaves room for more adventures, and fans’ interest in the series will be just as rabid after this fast-paced, good-humored entry.
Another solid adventure that doesn’t reinvent the wheel but spins it quite well. (Adventure. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-7785-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
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The 10th and final full-length episode in an alternate-Earth series that's just about reached its sell-by date unites the five members of the central cast in yet another rescue mission to a distant land. This time its a thinly disguised medieval Japan, where bluff young warrior Horace has been swept up in the entourage accompanying a kindly emperor who is on the run from a vicious usurper. Thanks to a sequence of massive coincidences, he is soon joined in a remote mountain fortress by Rangers Will (who graduated from "apprentice" about five volumes ago) and his crusty mentor Halt, plus temperamental Princess Evanlyn and her spunky frenemy Alyss. While the usurper and his forces obligingly winter nearby, the menfolk train a peasant army for the true emperor while Evanlyn and Alyss set out to recruit more allies and have an air-clearing heart-to-heart about who really loves whom. By the end battles are won, bad guys slain, feasts held and everyone heads home for weddings and further adventures. The "keep it simple" approach has served Flanagan—and readers who prefer predictable plots and easily recognizable settings and character types—well, but the formula has staled. "The Final Battle" blazoned on the cover indicates a recognition of this fact, though loose ends leave open the possibility of further, as-yet-unplanned developments. Here's hoping a break will restore zing to future adventures. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-25500-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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