Doesn’t set itself apart from the rest of the animal-rescue pack.
A girl and her wolf pack perform animal rescues in this series opener from the YouTuber best known as StacyPlays.
Twelve-year-old Stacy has been living in the taiga (defined in an appended glossary) with a pack of arctic wolves for the past four years, with only the barest hints of memories at her life before that. These wolves can understand her, communicate with her with body language, and even take care of her education (an intellectual wolf named Addison likes to swipe reading materials for Stacy). Together, Stacy and her wolves engage in daring rescues of other animals in dramatic settings. On one of these rescues, they save a little dog, Page, from a pack of wild wolves. (Page is named after the author’s real dog; she can communicate with bats.) This growing, hungry pack causes trouble for Stacy’s wolves, as their hunting farm animals prompts nearby humans to push for a bounty on wolves to thin the population. Developers who wish to turn the entire area into a luxury resort pose an additional threat. The animals’ uneven levels of anthropomorphization and intelligence are never explained; questions of Stacy’s backstory too are left unanswered. Undemanding and episodic, the book concludes with a blurb about the author’s trip to the taiga, a profile of the real-life Page, and, in a welcome departure from self-promotion, a profile of a wolf researcher.
Doesn’t set itself apart from the rest of the animal-rescue pack. (Animal fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: May 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-279637-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel.
Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment.
Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. George and Harold link up in kindergarten to reduce a quartet of vicious bullies to giggling insanity with a relentless series of pranks involving shaving cream, spiders, effeminate spoof text messages and friendship bracelets. Pilkey tucks both topical jokes and bathroom humor into the cartoon art, and ups the narrative’s lexical ante with terms like “pharmaceuticals” and “theatrical flair.” Unfortunately, the bullies’ sad fates force Krupp to resign, so he’s not around to save the Earth from being destroyed later on by Talking Toilets and other invaders…
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-17534-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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