Young fantasy fans will find Jasper’s adventures entertaining and easy to follow.
In the first volume of the fantasy series, 13-year-old Jasper Flint is magically transported to an underground world in need of his help.
Eleven years after he was found on an orphanage’s doorstep with a mysterious purple gemstone around his neck, Jasper is entering a rocky adolescence. His adoptive parents don’t seem to care about him, the class bully won’t leave him alone and only his two friends seem to care he exists. But all that changes when he goes on a class field trip to a museum. Jasper and his friends get lost in an off-limits wing of the museum, where Jasper finds an ancient book and reads a passage aloud. Suddenly a doorway made of light appears and sucks him in, sending him hurtling down toward the center of the earth. After landing, he’s found and taken to the “Underworld” village of Chalcedon, where the people look like him and wear precious stones like his around their necks. From here, the plot is entertaining and suspenseful, with an interesting twist on the tried-and-true trope of underground cities. In this world, people can harness the power of their birthstones and they’re judged more on their magical abilities and personal integrity than on their physical appearance or prowess. Though many aspects of this world are preferable to the “Overworld” (with its bullying and disinterested adoptive parents), the villages of the Underworld are threatened by the evil tyrant Zircon. Although the plot rolls forward with subterranean drama, the writing could use substantial polishing to make it sparkle. Also, the dialogue is often stilted and unrealistic, which further clouds the excitement that is already sometimes halted by flat attempts at humor. Eventually, Jasper sets out on an adventure to recover the purple stone of Burro Creek, which has the power to send him back home, while at the same time he tries to help save the village from being destroyed. Some of the plot twists are unbelievable, even for fantasy, but younger readers may not be distracted. Instead, they’ll be waiting for the sequel.
Young fantasy fans will find Jasper’s adventures entertaining and easy to follow.Pub Date: Dec. 23, 2011
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Redcave
Review Posted Online: Feb. 27, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
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SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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