Witty, competent daughters enjoy just enough danger as they learn useful lessons.
Two sisters stumble upon the plans of an evil witch and her minions in this middle-grade fantasy debut.
In the kingdom of Highcynder, 12-year-old Emily Daring watches her younger sister, Elizabeth, practice archery. Their father is Duke Daring, the hero of Highcynder, whom Elizabeth hopes to impress. After Elizabeth accidentally hits their neighbor Nathan Wormington with a practice arrow, the duchess puts her daughters’ energy to use by sending them to the market. The girls visit Annie Whipperpeel’s Sweets Shoppe to buy “sweetberry” pie. Tragically—in their view—the bakery hasn’t had any sweetberries in a week. Annie believes that mischievous forest gnomes took them all. Unsure of Annie’s theory, the siblings decide to sneak into the Enchanted Forest to investigate. They follow gnome prints to a cave—however, it’s goblins they find. As the adventurous duo defends against an armed, beady-eyed enemy, gnomes arrive to give the girls backup. The leader, Randolph, explains that the goblins have been working with the ogre king to horde sweetberries. Further, a witch is commanding the creatures, adding the berries to what may be a sleeping potion. When Elizabeth suggests they sneak into the ogre’s lair, Emily argues. Harsh words cause the sisters to separate, but they soon realize that teamwork is the only way to survive their adventure, one of the valuable lessons the story holds for its young readers. Unlike nearby kingdoms—Dublari, for example, which is built on slavery—Highcynder prizes an individual’s skills above parentage or status. Yet the girls behave in suitably childlike ways when they fib to their mother about going off to the Enchanted Forest; the duchess is just happy to see her daughters getting along. The witch’s goal, to remove a measure of people's freedom “to be utilized for the greater good,” should make sense to children, though it does step toward larger philosophical and political conversations. The garden gnome Periwinkle, who travels in Emily’s backpack, provides occasional comedic relief. Depictions of violence are always brief and not too gory (“The ogre king was...run through by the iron spikes”). Ferchaud’s (Princess Yellow Boots Finds a Friend, 2019, etc.) excellent black-and-white pencil illustrations greatly enhance the novel.
Witty, competent daughters enjoy just enough danger as they learn useful lessons.Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9967232-0-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: KECELJ Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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