Zany and thoughtful; an overt but fun parable.
A madcap preteen quest offers a serious message in this children’s novel.
In the town of Embleton, it is the day of the Splitting, a ritual where 10-year-old Tipple and all of the other kids his age from the eastern townships will be categorized according to their abilities and limitations. The Splitting is centuries-old. It has pigeonholed generation after generation, restricting children’s options and snuffing out their potentials. Tipple is an imaginative, adventurous boy. He doesn’t yet know what his future might be and doesn’t need it mandated for him. He and his friend Shammy don’t want to be separated. They see their differences as a strength and don’t wish to be stopped from staging make-believe exploits inspired by the legendary wizard Poopy Patinski. Thankfully, excitingly, the Splitting this year is interrupted. Embleton’s most sacred, powerful artifact, the Green Egg, has been stolen by Moo Moo Chickens, and it is up to the 10-year-olds to recover it from deep within the Forest of Enzar. While the other kids are arguing and trying to form themselves into groups, Tipple and Shammy set off. Soon they are in the thick of adventure, confronting Attack Squirrels, robot grannies, and, of course, Moo Moo Chickens. Will Tipple and Shammy retrieve the Green Egg and demonstrate to the eastern townships the wrongness of the Splitting? In this fifth installment of a series, Graham (The Revenge of the Moo Moo Chickens, 2011, etc.) uses his story to promote positive life lessons and isn’t afraid to put them up front. Tipple is often an authorial mouthpiece, not just narrating out loud in the first person, but also thinking through the morals of the tale (and indeed delivering them in dialogue, irrespective of how artificial this sounds). The author is not the smoothest of writers. His tenses sometimes jump tracks—“We did everything together, which would include the Splitting. I hope we ended up in the same group as I couldn’t imagine doing the Splitting without him”—and on several occasions, he has Tipple repeat himself. But such deficiencies are hard to frown upon in view of the book’s high-spirited celebration of self-worth. Tipple and Shammy are just the right sort of cool/uncool. The tale’s throwaway references (like Pickle Weasels and Wangle-beavers) alone should be enough to delight young readers.
Zany and thoughtful; an overt but fun parable.Pub Date: June 7, 2018
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 101
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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