This entry in the Monster High/Ever After High franchise may please fans, but it’s unlikely to win new ones.
The World of Stories is in danger, and it’s up to the offspring of famous fairy-tale characters and monsters to team up to save the day.
Fairy-tale characters don’t believe in monsters, and monsters don’t believe in fairy tales. Each group lives in its own carefully isolated island-world within the World of Stories. Then Frankie Stein and Draculaura accidentally transport themselves from Monster High to Ever After High, where they meet Apple White (Snow’s daughter) and her friend Raven Queen, the Evil Queen’s daughter (Apple and Raven's familial connection is unremarked upon). After mutual exclamations that these mythological figures really exist, the four girls band together to stop Raven’s power-hungry mother, recently escaped from mirror prison, from freeing Shadow High from the annals of legend. If they fail, the lands that make up the World of Stories will come crashing together, unmaking the entire World and destroying everyone in it. Third-person, present-tense narration with asides in the form of footnotes makes the novice Narrator, Brooke Page, a character who breaks the fourth wall. Self-awareness abounds; puns, literal interpretations of figurative sayings, and the series’ trademark portmanteaus (“fangtastic,” “spelltacular”) fill the pages and may strike many as precious rather than cute. Moreover, overuse of the same jokes grows tiring (how many jokes can be made of the famous “Pease Porridge” rhyme?—five, apparently).
This entry in the Monster High/Ever After High franchise may please fans, but it’s unlikely to win new ones. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-35282-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions.
An isolated class of misfits and a teacher on the edge of retirement are paired together for a year of (supposed) failure.
Zachary Kermit, a 55-year-old teacher, has been haunted for the last 27 years by a student cheating scandal that has earned him the derision of his colleagues and killed his teaching spirit. So when he is assigned to teach the Self-Contained Special Eighth-Grade Class—a dumping ground for “the Unteachables,” students with “behavior issues, learning problems, juvenile delinquents”—he is unfazed, as he is only a year away from early retirement. His relationship with his seven students—diverse in temperament, circumstance, and ability—will be one of “uncomfortable roommates” until June. But when Mr. Kermit unexpectedly stands up for a student, the kids of SCS-8 notice his sense of “justice and fairness.” Mr. Kermit finds he may even care a little about them, and they start to care back in their own way, turning a corner and bringing along a few ghosts from Mr. Kermit’s past. Writing in the alternating voices of Mr. Kermit, most of his students, and two administrators, Korman spins a narrative of redemption and belief in exceeding self-expectations. Naming conventions indicate characters of different ethnic backgrounds, but the book subscribes to a white default. The two students who do not narrate may be students of color, and their characterizations subtly—though arguably inadequately—demonstrate the danger of preconceptions.
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-256388-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
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