A brave adventure with meaningful depth.
Paola battles the supernatural to save her friend in this follow-up to 2021’s Paola Santiago and the Forest of Nightmares.
Dante, one of Pao’s best friends, has been missing for 8 months: He’s trapped in the void, a place full of terrible creatures and dread, and she’s desperate to rescue him. But Mexican American Pao may be suffering from PTSD, and the adults in her life want her to stay home and play it safe. Frustrated, Pao and Emma, her other best friend, take matters into their own hands, brewing up a tea intended to restore Pao’s magical dreams of the void. It works—and Pao realizes she must travel to San Antonio, Texas, as soon as possible if she hopes to save Dante. To get there, she tags along with Emma’s new friends from the Rainbow Rogues, who are going on an environmental conservation volunteer trip to New Orleans. The bus journey from Arizona soon takes a dark turn, triggering a thrilling, fast-paced series of events that force Pao to confront El Cucuy, the lord of nightmares, and his apocalyptic plot as well as to learn to ask for help. While love is often depicted as the means to individually defeat evil, this story conveys a resonant message about the power of broader community support. As she battles monsters, Pao also privately explores her sexual identity and romantic feelings for Emma, who is queer.
A brave adventure with meaningful depth. (Fantasy. 8-13)Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-368-07687-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Rick Riordan Presents/Disney
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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