Middle-schoolers Courtney, Orion and Ming accidentally raise the long-dead spirits of Phantom Islanders entrapped by an early 20th-century scientist and carried away from their Indian Ocean home to Carville, Mass., where they’ve been hidden in books in the library’s basement stacks. From the opening midnight break-in through the book-burning demonstration to the final hurried release of the captives, Alter sustains the suspense of this engaging ghost story. Although firmly set in a modern-day world with computers, copiers and sterile nursing homes, this has the air of an old-fashioned adventure, in which determined children, with the help of a sympathetic librarian, right an ancient wrong. Side stories of some of the spirits introduce the reader to their lost tropical world, an idyllic place populated by shipwreck survivors from around the globe. The pressure of Orion and Ming’s determinedly positive sixth-grade teacher’s efforts to ban books with unhappy endings adds humor as well as tension, allowing the librarian to remind readers of the importance of freedom of choice. Fresh and familiar—an entertaining read. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2007
ISBN: 1-58234-738-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
Copious research substantiates this biography of Sitting Bull, but St. George (Dear Dr. Bell . . . Your Friend, Helen Keller, 1992, etc.) provides no real sense of the man or why he was considered a great leader. A labored text reads like a cut-and-paste exercise, a grinding out of fact after fact, without insights to behavior or an analysis of Sitting Bull as a real person. Much is made of Sitting Bull the warrior; nearly 100 pages precede the information that he was also a holy man who directed his life and the lives of the people for whom he was responsible through visions. Sitting Bull's joy in fatherhood is presented as dry fact; readers do not see any expression of the depth of his feelings until two-thirds into the book, when he mourns the death of a child. His noted sense of humor is not in evidence until the last pages of the book, when he tells a reporter that white people are ``a great people, as numerous as the flies that follow the buffalo.'' Some incidents beg for explanation, e.g., young Sitting Bull urges his warriors into battle with the cry, ``Saddle up; saddle up! We are going to fight the soldiers again.'' For those still unenlightened as to the bareback-rider stereotype, this is a startling sentence; without attribution in context or in notes, readers have no way of knowing the source of many quotations. (index, not seen, bibliography) (Nonfiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: May 7, 1996
ISBN: 0-399-22930-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
Stories about the author's childhood adventures growing up in a small town, including one in which a delinquent dog tangles with a skunk, and two in which eminently satisfying tricks are played on pompous bullies. Others involve youthful disasters, accident-prone friends, eccentric townsfolk, camp-outs, and crazy schemes. McManus is a sort of Dave Barry for kids. His stories are not merely amusing: They are laugh-out-loud, stomach-clutching, tears-rolling-down-your-cheeks hilarious. Factual or not, the names of people display a backwoods Dickensian humor, from Rancid Crabtree, the old woodsman, to a friend, Retch Sweeney, and his two kid brothers, Erful and Verman, and to Miss Goosehart, a teacher at Delmore Blight Grade School. The humor is often broad, but its expression is matter-of-fact; McManus writes for those with good vocabularies who can read between the lines. Really comic stories that also treat this audience with intelligence are something of a rarity; this collection is as welcome as lemonade in the desert. (Short stories. 10-12)
Pub Date: May 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8050-4662-3
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1996
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