New chapters in this metafictional romp leave the villains ascendant. Stay tuned.
A sudden rash of kidnappings and random violence kicks off a major challenge to the reign of King Arthur’s newly crowned son, Tedros.
The shining titular promise of the previous episode, The Last Ever After (2015), fades as Tedros—noble at heart but paralyzed by self-doubt and, it must be said, dumb as a box of rocks—refuses to ask his clever, loving fiancee, Agatha, for help dealing with pirates and other raiders. Meanwhile, back at the titular school, her glamorous BFF, Sophie, newly appointed Dean of Evil, discovers that all of the fourth-year students are somehow failing in their obligatory, assigned Quests. With a crew of allies (including Nicola, a nonmagical but quick-witted Reader), Agatha and Sophie set out to investigate and discover amid a characteristic mix of tongue-in-cheek set pieces and harrowing scrapes that a (possibly) legitimate contender for the throne of Camelot has risen, with deadly powers including (apparently) the ability to twist and corrupt storylines with “different truth.” In a slow-to-arrive but catastrophic climax, Agatha, Tedros, and the rest discover too late that they’ve been thoroughly played throughout; the final pages find them not only routed in battle, but tricked into a series of devastating betrayals. Bruno’s polished vignettes add appropriate notes of humor and horror and reveal Nicola to be black, in contrast to the mostly white or pale-skinned cast.
New chapters in this metafictional romp leave the villains ascendant. Stay tuned. (color map) (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-265847-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A terrific premise buried beneath problem-novel tropes.
A gaggle of eighth graders find the coolest clubhouse ever.
Fulfilling the fantasies of anyone who’s ever constructed a fort in their bedroom or elsewhere, Korman hands his five middle schoolers a fully stocked bomb shelter constructed decades ago in the local woods by an eccentric tycoon and lost until a hurricane exposes the entrance. So, how to keep the hideout secret from interfering grown-ups—and, more particularly, from scary teen psychopath Jaeger Devlin? The challenge is tougher still when everyone in the central cast is saddled with something: C.J. struggles to hide injuries inflicted by the unstable stepdad his likewise abused mother persists in enabling; Jason is both caught in the middle of a vicious divorce and unable to stand up to his controlling girlfriend; Evan is not only abandoned by drug-abusing parents, but sees his big brother going to the bad thanks to Jaeger’s influence; Mitchell struggles with OCD–fueled anxieties and superstitions; and so forth. How to keep a story overtaxed with issues and conflicts from turning into a dreary slog? Spoiler alert: Neither the author nor his characters ultimately prove equal to the challenge. With the possible exception of Ricky Molina, one of the multiple narrators, everyone seems to be White.
A terrific premise buried beneath problem-novel tropes. (resources, author’s note) (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-62914-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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