Too big for back-seat entertainment or to tuck into a parental backpack as a portable means of distraction—but rewarding to...
In a challenging workout for Where’s Waldo? fans a Canadian cartoonist offers 82 teeming scenes in pairs that are identical only at first glance.
Presented side by side on tall, floppy pages bound at the top, each pair of paintings has 20 small differences for sharp-eyed viewers to identify. They feature dozens of, usually, tiny rabbits in human dress swarming through city or country settings in various seasons. These differences range from an airport worker’s warning sign here that is blank there and changing numbers in an arithmetic problem on a chalkboard in front of a “school” of marine creatures to a swarm of diminutive Santas constructing a “Trojan Rudolph” with a nose that’s glowing in only one view. Mercifully, Bùi describes all the changes in every pair at the end. Smaller hands will have difficulty wrestling with the ungainly format, but the figures and action are depicted with fine-lined exactitude, and there’s plenty of stage business and visual humor to keep even browsers uninterested in playing the intended game amused.
Too big for back-seat entertainment or to tuck into a parental backpack as a portable means of distraction—but rewarding to pore over in roomier situations. (Picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-77049-279-0
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Tundra Books
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
A familiar story skillfully reimagined for today’s gadget-savvy youth.
Hannah Hadley is a young special agent who must thwart a clear and present danger to the United States in Hoover’s “smart is cool” young adult novel.
Hannah Hadley might seem like most 13-year-old girls. She enjoys painting, playing with her MP3 player and spending time with friends. But that’s where the similarities end. Hadley doubles as Agent 10-1, among the youngest spies drafted into the CIA’s Div Y department. She’s joined in her missions by her 10-pound Shih Tzu, Kiwi (with whom she communicates telepathically), and her best friend Tommie Claire, a blind girl with heightened senses. When duty calls, the group sneaks to a hidden command center located under the floor of Hadley’s art studio. Her current mission, aptly named “Operation Farmer Jones,” takes her to a secluded farmhouse in Canada. There, al-Qaida terrorists have gathered the necessary ingredients for a particularly devastating nuclear warhead that they intend to fire into America. The villains are joined by the Mad Madam of Mayhem, a physicist for hire whom the terrorists force to complete the weapon of mass destruction. With Charlie Higson’s Young James Bond series and the ongoing 39 Clues novellas, covert missions and secret plans are the plots of choice in much of today’s fiction for young readers, and references to the famed 007 stories abound in Hoover’s tale. But while the plot feels familiar, Hoover’s use of modern slang—albeit strained at times—and gadgets such as the iTouch appeal to today’s youth. Placing girls in adult situations has been a mainstay since Mildred Wirt Benson first introduced readers to Nancy Drew in The Secret of the Old Clock, but Hannah Hadley is like Nancy Drew on steroids. Both are athletic, score well in their studies and have a measure of popularity. Hadley, however, displays a genius-level intellect and near superhuman abilities in her efforts to roust the terrorists—handy skills for a young teen spy who just so happens to get the best grades in school.
A familiar story skillfully reimagined for today’s gadget-savvy youth.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0615419688
Page Count: 239
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A mermaid is born with two tails, and a boy is born with webbed fingers in this lengthy original fairy tale. They suffer the tribulations that are the lot of the different: ridicule and shunning. Neither has friends, and they are both delivered unto a circus sideshow presided over by the shrill and heartless Ring Mistress (drawn with marcel wave and pinched mouth). The two begin to wither in their own ways, until fate draws them into close association and they discover their similarities; not just the webbed fingers but something deeper and elementally innocent binds them. George’s narrative is ethereal and formal, with a voiceover quality that invests the artwork with cinematic flow. Halpin’s curious combination of aggressively cherubic, if somewhat characterless, faces and emotive, atmospheric settings benefits from this. It says much for the writing that it carries the reader along, despite the bonding of the mermaid and the boy being foregone, their escape destined (though that’s a drawn-out affair in which the illustrations can’t corral all the action). The epilogue has an unexpected, romantic twist—heroic, adventurous, idealized—that bodes well for a sequel. (Picture book. 6-9)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-897476-53-6
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Simply Read
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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