Oona’s back story has a mystery or two left; sequels will likely follow and hopefully improve.
Can Oona meet the challenges of the Magician’s Tower?
Three months after 13-year-old Natural Magician Oona Crate’s last mysterious and magical adventure (The Wizard of Dark Street, 2011), the time has come for the Magician’s Tower Competition. Every five years, a new tower is built along Dark Street, the only conduit between Faerie and New York City, with new challenges, physical and mental, installed on each floor. Contestants compete through four days of elimination challenges in hopes of reaching the final challenge: a puzzle box no one has solved in the 500 years the contest has been running. Oona sets aside her Wizard’s apprentice duties to compete against her old acquaintances and rivals Adler and Isadora Iree and Roderick Rutherford, among others. Can she beat them and reach her goal or will she be distracted by the mystery of the missing punch bowl? Odyssey’s sequel suffers from many of the same problems as its predecessor. Though it is set in 1877, the historical setting is given nary a nod. The characters don't rise above clichés, and each has one characteristic trait that quickly grows old. The flabby prose teems with detail but pays little attention to it once it is introduced.
Oona’s back story has a mystery or two left; sequels will likely follow and hopefully improve. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60684-425-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Egmont USA
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
It’s not the first time old Ben has paid our times a call, but it’s funny and free-spirited, with an informational load that...
Antics both instructive and embarrassing ensue after a mysterious package left on their doorstep brings a Founding Father into the lives of two modern children.
Summoned somehow by what looks for all the world like an old-time crystal radio set, Ben Franklin turns out to be an amiable sort. He is immediately taken in hand by 7-year-old Olive for a tour of modern wonders—early versions of which many, from electrical appliances in the kitchen to the Illinois town’s public library and fire department, he justly lays claim to inventing. Meanwhile big brother Nolan, 10, tags along, frantic to return him to his own era before either their divorced mom or snoopy classmate Tommy Tuttle sees him. Fleming, author of Ben Franklin’s Almanac (2003) (and also, not uncoincidentally considering the final scene of this outing, Our Eleanor, 2005), mixes history with humor as the great man dispenses aphorisms and reminiscences through diverse misadventures, all of which end well, before vanishing at last. Following a closing, sequel-cueing kicker (see above) she then separates facts from fancies in closing notes, with print and online leads to more of the former. To go with spot illustrations of the evidently all-white cast throughout the narrative, Fearing incorporates change-of-pace sets of sequential panels for Franklin’s biographical and scientific anecdotes. Final illustrations not seen.
It’s not the first time old Ben has paid our times a call, but it’s funny and free-spirited, with an informational load that adds flavor without weight. (Graphic/fantasy hybrid. 9-11)Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-101-93406-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Schwartz & Wade/Random
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
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