An engaging book for kids, with a particular interest for the budding mechanic.
A middle-grade fantasy novel continues the story of a young inventor and his hidden golden hometown of Chelldrah-ham.
After the events of the previous book (Stig’s Flight of Encounters, 2014), Stig returns to Chelldrah-ham with tales of the lands beyond: the sentient wooden pods that produce healing “corms,” the corrupted race of creatures called the Bach, the flower-wearing folk of the forest of Polandrea. The city’s Elders have debriefed him thoroughly about the Bach threat as well as the strange substance called “usty metal.” Stig’s instincts tell him they’re hiding something, so he keeps his newly developed empathic abilities secret, though he frequently communicates in dreams with Meg, the Polandrean girl he fell for on his journey. Alarmed when she falls silent, he gains permission to visit her, setting out with his best friend, Arn, one of the city’s doughty Guards of Old. They are shocked when they retrace Stig’s steps, visiting the homes of friends he made—and discover only devastation, the aftermath of fierce battles with the Bach. And when they finally reach Meg’s homeland, they discover that she’s missing, on a mission to rescue her brother, one of many Polandreans kidnapped by the Bach for nefarious purposes. Soon, Stig learns that the Bach are under the influence of a woman named Anet, who came through a rift from a place called Earth, “not on this planet, but also not off it.” Anet starts to breed bigger, more evil Bach with the help of a poison called Chaos; she plans to unleash her army and take over both worlds. Can Stig and his friends stop her before it’s too late? While the first book in the Chelldrah-ham series suffered from a surfeit of exposition, the background details pay off in this fast-paced sequel. Von Clinkerhoffen blends imaginative flora (like the fluid-filled flowers used as canteens) and fauna (Stig’s pets Noname, a plimph, and Jess, a fledgling bird of prey called a jeswit) with the hero’s love of machinery and problem-solving skills. The narrative chronicles Stig’s experiments with various contraptions, including a plane (he “pushed the motor lever forward to ‘Go.’ The motor whirred, the plane started to make a wooooooo sound, and a wind started to blow from the rear of the fuselage. It bounced slowly and then started shaking violently”).
An engaging book for kids, with a particular interest for the budding mechanic.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5147-0361-8
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.
Three women deal very differently with vampirism in Schwab’s era-spanning follow-up to The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue (2020).
In 16th-century Spain, Maria seduces a wealthy viscount in an attempt to seize whatever control she can over her own life. It turns out that being a wife—even a wealthy one—is just another cage, but then a mysterious widow offers Maria a surprising escape route. In the 19th century, Charlotte is sent from her home in the English countryside to live with an aunt in London when she’s found trying to kiss her best friend. She’s despondent at the idea of marrying a man, but another mysterious widow—who has a secret connection to Maria’s widow from centuries earlier—appears and teaches Charlotte that she can be free to love whomever she chooses, if she’s brave enough. In 2019, Alice’s memories of growing up in Scotland with her mercurial older sister, Catty, pull her mind away from her first days at Harvard University. And though she doesn’t meet any mysterious widows, Alice wakes up alone after a one-night stand unable to tolerate sunlight, sporting two new fangs, and desperate to drink blood. Horrified at her transformation, she searches Boston for her hookup, who was the last person she remembers seeing before she woke up as a vampire. Schwab delicately intertwines the three storylines, which are compelling individually even before the reader knows how they will connect. Maria, Charlotte, and Alice are queer women searching for love, recognition, and wholeness, growing fangs and defying mortality in a world that would deny them their very existence. Alice’s flashbacks to Catty are particularly moving, and subtly play off themes of grief and loneliness laid out in the historical timelines.
A beautiful meditation on queer identity against a supernatural backdrop.Pub Date: June 10, 2025
ISBN: 9781250320520
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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
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