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
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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