Unlike Webb, readers can face grizzly bears, wolves and psychopaths in the cozy confines of a good book.
Seventeen-year-old Jim Webb must travel the Canol Trail in Canada’s Northwest Territories to fulfill a specific request made in the unusual will of David McLean, his beloved grandfather.
Webb may be the only hiker ever to travel Canada’s Far North with a Gibson J-45 acoustic guitar strapped across his back, but it means the world to him, his father’s last gift to him before dying of cancer. Webb’s stepfather has tormented him and made life at home untenable, but evil is also afoot in Yellowknife in the form of psychopathic Brent Melrose. After facing Brent, walking 110 kilometers through a “bear-filled, wolf-infested, roadless wilderness” won’t seem so bad. But it is bad, and Webb begins to see the wisdom in his grandfather’s favorite Nietzsche quotation: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” Brouwer weaves twin narratives to good effect, a present-tense story of Webb’s attempt to solve his grandfather’s mystery at Mile 112, and flashbacks that inform readers as to why Webb is on the journey in the first place. Part of a seven-novel series with simultaneous release dates, this volume is especially targeted at boys looking for action and suspense. A likable guitar-playing protagonist is a bonus.
Unlike Webb, readers can face grizzly bears, wolves and psychopaths in the cozy confines of a good book. (Adventure. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-55469-938-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Orca
Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
Ebulliently original.
Who can't love a story about a Nigerian-American 12-year-old with albinism who discovers latent magical abilities and saves the world?
Sunny lives in Nigeria after spending the first nine years of her life in New York. She can't play soccer with the boys because, as she says, "being albino made the sun my enemy," and she has only enemies at school. When a boy in her class, Orlu, rescues her from a beating, Sunny is drawn in to a magical world she's never known existed. Sunny, it seems, is a Leopard person, one of the magical folk who live in a world mostly populated by ignorant Lambs. Now she spends the day in mundane Lamb school and sneaks out at night to learn magic with her cadre of Leopard friends: a handsome American bad boy, an arrogant girl who is Orlu’s childhood friend and Orlu himself. Though Sunny's initiative is thin—she is pushed into most of her choices by her friends and by Leopard adults—the worldbuilding for Leopard society is stellar, packed with details that will enthrall readers bored with the same old magical worlds. Meanwhile, those looking for a touch of the familiar will find it in Sunny's biggest victories, which are entirely non-magical (the detailed dynamism of Sunny's soccer match is more thrilling than her magical world saving).
Ebulliently original. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: April 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-01196-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
A satisfying story of family, friendship and small-town cooperation in a 21st-century world.
Sent to stay with octogenarian relatives for the summer, 14-year-old Mike ends up coordinating a community drive to raise $40,000 for the adoption of a Romanian orphan. He’ll never be his dad's kind of engineer, but he learns he’s great at human engineering.
Mike’s math learning disability is matched by his widower father's lack of social competence; the Giant Genius can’t even reliably remember his son’s name. Like many of the folks the boy comes to know in Do Over, Penn.—his great-uncle Poppy silent in his chair, the multiply pierced-and-tattooed Gladys from the bank and “a homeless guy” who calls himself Past—Mike feels like a failure. But in spite of his own lack of confidence, he provides the kick start they need to cope with their losses and contribute to the campaign. Using the Internet (especially YouTube), Mike makes use of town talents and his own webpage design skills and entrepreneurial imagination. Math-definition chapter headings (Compatible Numbers, Zero Property, Tessellations) turn out to apply well to human actions in this well-paced, first-person narrative. Erskine described Asperger’s syndrome from the inside in Mockingbird (2010). Here, it’s a likely cause for the rift between father and son touchingly mended at the novel's cinematic conclusion.
A satisfying story of family, friendship and small-town cooperation in a 21st-century world. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: June 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-25505-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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