A promising series continues with a deft mix of suspense, relatable characters, and well-integrated educational...
An overnight elementary school field trip to the local museum turns into a mystery-solving adventure in Knight’s (Finn & Botts: Curse of the Cornfield Ghost, 2019, etc.) second chapter book in a series.
Best friends Finn and Botts are caught up in another spooky mystery—this time, during a sleepover with their classmates in the Dinosaur Gallery at the Kealstal City Museum. Why are bones missing from the new dinosaur exhibit? Where does the trail of grayish, oddly sparkly dust lead? Who’s responsible for the secret tunnel in the museum that Finn and Botts discover, and who’s sneaking around in raptor costumes? Knight weaves a smattering of information about minerals and gems into this lively adventure as well as numerous dinosaur facts. Along the way, his colorful main characters and their supportive friend Tess tour the exhibits, eat pizza, and identify the dinosaurs on the museum director’s scavenger hunt list. Knight’s atmospheric descriptions of the exhibits at night and of behind-the-scenes locations (including a security office with a bank of video screens) will give readers an enjoyable sense of what it’s like to be in a museum after dark. In the humorous, full-page, grayscale illustrations that complement each chapter, artist Meyers (The Baltimore Bandit, 2019, etc.) again depicts the characters as pigs, albeit ones that are completely human in appearance and behavior. (There’s one visual head-scratcher, however: The caveman masks that Finn and Botts wear at one point have human, not porcine, features.) The mystery that the main characters stumble upon and solve comes to an eventful conclusion, and the book ends with a word puzzle for readers to complete themselves, with answers that they can find throughout the story.
A promising series continues with a deft mix of suspense, relatable characters, and well-integrated educational entertainment.Pub Date: July 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73360-921-0
Page Count: 116
Publisher: Dreamwell Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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 first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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