The components are there; the cohesion is not
Lost in the Montana wilderness, two white children and a tame gyrfalcon learn to trust one another.
Thirteen-year-old home-schooled Karma lives in Montana on her family’s bird-of-prey education center, where she helps her white father train raptors. Karma longs to have friends but worries she talks too much about hawks and falcons—her favorite is a rescued white gyrfalcon named Stark. When Stark’s owner reclaims her, Karma reluctantly drives with her father and younger brother to deliver her. Shortly after letting off an unfriendly teenage-boy hitchhiker named Cooper, their van blows a tire and crashes. With her father and brother injured and Stark escaped, Karma sets out to find help. After she falls into a crevice, she is rescued by the mysterious Cooper, who spotted her thanks to the white bird circling overhead. Overjoyed to find Stark, Karma continues her search for help. As she and Cooper hike into the wilderness, they endure a slew of unfortunate events that would make Lemony Snicket proud (grizzly, near-drowning, falling, infection, thunderstorm/hail), and Cooper gradually reveals his past. Karma’s simple present-tense, first-person narration is inconsistent in her worry for her father and brother, and interesting information on falconry and raptors is imparted in an academic style that lacks smooth integration into the story.
The components are there; the cohesion is not . (Adventure. 9-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-58089-788-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Entrancing and uplifting.
A small dog, the elderly woman who owns him, and a homeless girl come together to create a tale of serendipity.
Piper, almost 12, her parents, and her younger brother are at the bottom of a long slide toward homelessness. Finally in a family shelter, Piper finds that her newfound safety gives her the opportunity to reach out to someone who needs help even more. Jewel, mentally ill, lives in the park with her dog, Baby. Unwilling to leave her pet, and forbidden to enter the shelter with him, she struggles with the winter weather. Ree, also homeless and with a large dog, helps when she can, but after Jewel gets sick and is hospitalized, Baby’s taken to the animal shelter, and Ree can’t manage the complex issues alone. It’s Piper, using her best investigative skills, who figures out Jewel’s backstory. Still, she needs all the help of the shelter Firefly Girls troop that she joins to achieve her accomplishment: to raise enough money to provide Jewel and Baby with a secure, hopeful future and, maybe, with their kindness, to inspire a happier story for Ree. Told in the authentic alternating voices of loving child and loyal dog, this tale could easily slump into a syrupy melodrama, but Pyron lets her well-drawn characters earn their believable happy ending, step by challenging step, by reaching out and working together. Piper, her family, and Jewel present white; Pyron uses hair and naming convention, respectively, to cue Ree as black and Piper’s friend Gabriela as Latinx.
Entrancing and uplifting. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283922-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Thrills galore for gamers willing to go along for the ride.
A new virtual-reality theme park goes haywire on a crowd of young victims, er, visitors in Alexander’s latest screamfest.
Having scored one of just 100 coveted preview tickets to a cutting-edge, kids-only venue dubbed ESCAPE, budding amusement park fan and designer Cody Baxter is looking forward to a life-changing experience. What he gets is more of a life-threatening one, as games and rides with names like Triassic Terror and Haunted Hillside not only pit him against a monster and then zombies—or sometimes a monster and zombies—as well as ruthless competing players, but seem tailored to play on individual personal terrors. And, in some never explained way, the VR quickly turns into real battles that inflict real wounds even as the real settings shift with sudden, dizzying unpredictability. Teaming up with loyal new friends Jayson Torn and Inga Andersdottir, the former described as being Japanese and White and the latter as Norwegian, Cody (who seems to default to White) struggles for survival, learning ultimately that ESCAPE was created by an evil genius with an ulterior motive who is convinced that he can teach children a salutary lesson. The plot’s no more logical in its twists and contrivances than the premise, but the author’s knack for spinning out nightmarish situations is definitely on display here as the tale careens toward a properly lurid outcome.
Thrills galore for gamers willing to go along for the ride. (Light horror. 9-12)Pub Date: June 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-26047-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 15, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2022
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