Another solid adventure that doesn’t reinvent the wheel but spins it quite well.
The spy kids return for another Spy School adventure.
By now, the students at the CIA’s Academy of Espionage have had multiple exciting encounters with the villainous organization that calls itself SPYDER. The CIA is keen to take advantage of an offer made to them by disgraced ex-spy Murray Hill, a captured SPYDER teen agent. Narrator and agent Ben Ripley, 13, and his partner, Erica Hale, 15, are the only agents Murray will lead to SPYDER’s secret headquarters, so the duo reluctantly follows the traitor’s lead while their fellow students Mike Brezinski and Zoe Zibbell stow away. Things go south quickly, and soon the group is stuck in a strange land with no backup. At this point in the series fans know what they’re getting, and Gibbs doesn’t disappoint. The dialogue crackles, the schemes are clever, and the plotting is tight and efficient. Gibbs doesn’t divulge any of the character’s ethnicities, leaving room for interpretation in a key moment that is gracefully organic to the narrative. The book’s finale leaves room for more adventures, and fans’ interest in the series will be just as rabid after this fast-paced, good-humored entry.
Another solid adventure that doesn’t reinvent the wheel but spins it quite well. (Adventure. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-7785-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
Working in the grand tradition of children’s fantasy, Wexler’s off to a promising start.
Being a Reader comes with significant challenges in this fantasy filled with ever-changing library stacks, enchanted books and talking cats.
Late one night, 12-year-old Alice Creighton stumbles upon her father in conversation with a threatening fairy. Next thing she knows, her dad is off to Buenos Aires on a steamer ship that mysteriously goes down in a freak storm. Now an orphan, she is sent to live with her uncle Jerry, aka Geryon, who happens to have an unusual and off-limits library that harbors a coveted book and creatures that may explain what really happened to Mr. Creighton. There, she meets the boy Isaac, a Reader, who has the power to enter books and interact with the creatures within them, and discovers that she’s a Reader, too. She is also given the opportunity to apprentice herself to Geryon, which she takes in a desperate effort to find her father. Alice proves to be an active and intelligent heroine who adeptly pulls compatriot and rival Isaac out of more than one potentially fatal challenge. Vaguely reminiscent of Harry Potter, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Inkheart all rolled into one, it’s good fun, if a tad light on character transformation and sagging a bit in the middle.
Working in the grand tradition of children’s fantasy, Wexler’s off to a promising start. (Fantasy. 10-14)Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8037-3975-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Kathy Dawson/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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