An entertaining, piquant set of fantastical yarns.
Kids battle arrogance, selfishness, guilt, and a cannibal zombie apocalypse in this lively suite of African-themed middle-grade fantasy stories.
Neill (Bunny Man’s Bridge, 2018, etc.), author of the Elk Riders series, creates a beguiling fictional world where cellphones and Land Rovers coexist with magic and spirits in a traditional African village. In “Jamhuri the Proud & the Tree of the Sky,” the young titular character declares himself a great warrior and demands the hand of the chief’s daughter, Latia Solei. To reach her hut atop an enormous acacia tree, he concocts grandiose, Wile E. Coyote–esque schemes: bouncing from a trampoline, lassoing a flock of flamingos, launching himself from a giant slingshot. But when he finally meets Latia, he gets a lesson regarding women’s autonomy that transitions the story from boisterous picaresque to a quietly resonant meditation on maturity. In the King Lear–inflected “Njambi, the Littlest Daughter,” four sisters set out on separate daunting journeys to Mount Kaliande to find the Water of Life that could heal their ailing father. Along the way, Njambi rediscovers that kindness and compassion pay off—and confronts murkier notions about the paradoxes of life and death. The longest story, “How to Fight Zombies,” finds the living dead besieging a nameless African city, where 13-year-old Anastasia is guilt-stricken when her negligence allows her little brother to be infected with the zombie plague. Advised by Njambi and Latia and assisted by Esmeralda, a blind girl who kicks butt with her walking staff, Anastasia astrally projects herself into Limbo to lead the zombies’ departed souls to the afterlife; unfortunately, she first must confront a 20-meter-tall demon called “Devourer of Souls.” The horror elements here are atmospheric and scary, but the story sometimes bogs down in rumination on the metaphysics of storytelling. Pitched at tweens, Neill’s prose throughout is usually well-paced and richly textured, with a nice balance of vigorous action (“a leopard leapt out at her, swinging its claws and grinning a terrible, hungry smile full of sharp teeth”) and Aesopian moralizing (“To hold a thing, one must keep an open hand”).
An entertaining, piquant set of fantastical yarns.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-986005-67-8
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Tenebray Press
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Harry Potter–like threads spun into a fresh, enjoyable mix of magic and mystery.
A teenage orphan enters a curious school and encounters mysteries and dangerous secrets in this first installment of a debut YA fantasy series.
Life in Croswald is about to change for 16-year-old orphan Ivy, a lowly castle maid in charge of the kitchen “scaldrons,” oven-heating, fire-breathing dragons. Fleeing the castle after a messy scaldron mishap, Ivy hops a strange conveyance that transports her to a school for potential quill-wielding, spell-casting “scrivenists.” (The author’s creative language—students are “sqwinches,” and “hairies” are lanterns housing fairies with luminous hair—is one of the book’s pleasures.) Learning that there is more to her gift for sketching than she realized, Ivy studies spells and the magical properties of inks and quills, but strange things keep happening. Why is an old scrivenist, long thought dead, working in secret? Why is the head of the oddly familiar school moving paintings to the “Forgetting Room” so that no one will remember they existed? How can Ivy get a look at a certain journal stored there, and what does it have to do with her recurrent dream? And why has Ivy drawn the interest of the Dark Queen of Croswald and her truly fearsome Cloaked Brood? The intrigue is layered with such whimsical inventions as one school lunchroom run by ghostly bad cooks and another by a jester who is best avoided, scrivenists who end their lives as tomes in a library, and small houses pulled by a gargantuan flying beast with its own weather system. Yes, there are many Harry Potter–ish elements: a school for young wand-wielders, quirky shops dealing in enchanted student supplies, eccentric characters, spells gone wrong, an evil pursuer. But Night’s blend of magic, danger, and suspense (and a touch of steampunk) is a well-realized, fresh fantasy world all its own, and Ivy is an appealing protagonist of relatable complexity. A few bobbles: Ivy seems to go without food for long stretches; the use of “effected” rather than “affected”; a professor who is both standing and perched on a chair.
Harry Potter–like threads spun into a fresh, enjoyable mix of magic and mystery.Pub Date: July 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9969486-5-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Stories Untold Press
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
In this riveting futuristic novel, Spaz, a teenage boy with epilepsy, makes a dangerous journey in the company of an old man and a young boy. The old man, Ryter, one of the few people remaining who can read and write, has dedicated his life to recording stories. Ryter feels a kinship with Spaz, who unlike his contemporaries has a strong memory; because of his epilepsy, Spaz cannot use the mind probes that deliver entertainment straight to the brain and rot it in the process. Nearly everyone around him uses probes to escape their life of ruin and poverty, the result of an earthquake that devastated the world decades earlier. Only the “proovs,” genetically improved people, have grass, trees, and blue skies in their aptly named Eden, inaccessible to the “normals” in the Urb. When Spaz sets out to reach his dying younger sister, he and his companions must cross three treacherous zones ruled by powerful bosses. Moving from one peril to the next, they survive only with help from a proov woman. Enriched by Ryter’s allusions to nearly lost literature and full of intriguing, invented slang, the skillful writing paints two pictures of what the world could look like in the future—the burned-out Urb and the pristine Eden—then shows the limits and strengths of each. Philbrick, author of Freak the Mighty (1993) has again created a compelling set of characters that engage the reader with their courage and kindness in a painful world that offers hope, if no happy endings. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-439-08758-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Blue Sky/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
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