A brave and canny heroine stands out in this portal adventure.
In this third installment of a series, a young girl leads a family in a dying world to safety in her own realm through a magic portal.
The two previous picture books, written in a fairy-tale–like style, introduced Magic Moon and his ability to grant certain requests. Now, this chapter book for young readers expands the concept, providing more background and linking Magic Moon’s world with Earth. The picture-book family now has names: Bronwen is the mother of Jackson, 10, and Dany, 7. But the realm they are inhabiting is temporary, and it’s time to return to their home world before the Gray Fog comes and obliterates all. Magic Moon is moving on as well but has promised Bronwen that a young girl will help. On present-day Earth, 10-year-old Tara has a warm family, including her father, mother, and stepfather, but she’s lonely for friends her own age. While exploring a mountain path, Tara discovers a secret cave. Following voices calling for aid, she steps through a magic portal and meets Jackson and Dany, leading them to safety. Tara’s father, Seneca, is enlisted to help Bronwen, who is injured. The two families get along well; Seneca invites Bronwen to use his cabin (he also has an apartment in the city), and by the end, Tara has gained new friends in Jackson and Dany—and maybe, she thinks, a stepmother in Bronwen. Moulton (Magic Moon: Sister’s Turn, 2017, etc.) offers much more detail and realism in this third series outing, although the reasons behind Bronwen’s first seeking a haven in another world remain murky. Sometimes the details aren’t well-chosen; knowing exactly where everyone was sitting in a truck doesn’t add much to the story, for example, except to pad out a rather thin plot. Moulton overly relies on distracting dialogue tags to convey meaning: “ ‘Hey, stop it!’ she warned,” for example, as if “stop it!” isn’t obviously a warning. That said, Tara’s resourcefulness is admirable. For example, needing a way to ensure she can find her way back to the cave, she tears her sock into strips and marks the path.
A brave and canny heroine stands out in this portal adventure.Pub Date: March 17, 2017
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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