A gentle, colorful magical adventure, with enough creepiness and kindness to sustain a series.
Social studies and algebra are plenty challenging for 11-year-old Wanda, but battling a dark sorcerer–no, not her history teacher–really tests a girl’s mettle.
Other than being a budding Crystal Keeper and caretaker of the fairy world, Wanda is your standard-issue middle-schooler, spunky and timorous. Despite her neophyte status, she has been tasked with thwarting the return of Balkazaar, an evil sorcerer. But she won’t have to go it alone. A goodly cast, their characters lightly but clearly etched by Turner, help Wanda in her otherworldly progress–a unicorn, a leprechaun, a couple cat sorcerers and, of course, Brownies and Pillywiggins. The author keeps the story humming as it moves from Wanda’s discovery that new friend Eddie is also a keeper, to her passage through the fairy world, to her engagement with Balkazaar. However, the author smartly pauses long enough at certain junctures–the sudden, strange death of bees and the legend of the Green Man–to provoke readers into deeper thinking. She also inserts old chestnuts into the story with such ease that they feel fresh and may even be absorbed as life lessons–sometimes wisdom is knowing when to ask for help, how to explore one’s limits and facing fear by taking it one step at a time. It’s also worthwhile to gnaw on some plot points. “Many true things have been lost into the myths,” says one of Wanda’s guides about the Green Man. “He has become hidden because the world has lost its respect for him.” Elsewhere, the concept of time raises some confusion–“The World of Fairy has no time,” the book declares before recounting the unicorn’s efforts to fold back time and get Wanda home before her mother finds her missing–but not enough to stop readers in their tracks.
A gentle, colorful magical adventure, with enough creepiness and kindness to sustain a series.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4269-2157-5
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.
A tightly wound caseworker is pushed out of his comfort zone when he’s sent to observe a remote orphanage for magical children.
Linus Baker loves rules, which makes him perfectly suited for his job as a midlevel bureaucrat working for the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, where he investigates orphanages for children who can do things like make objects float, who have tails or feathers, and even those who are young witches. Linus clings to the notion that his job is about saving children from cruel or dangerous homes, but really he’s a cog in a government machine that treats magical children as second-class citizens. When Extremely Upper Management sends for Linus, he learns that his next assignment is a mission to an island orphanage for especially dangerous kids. He is to stay on the island for a month and write reports for Extremely Upper Management, which warns him to be especially meticulous in his observations. When he reaches the island, he meets extraordinary kids like Talia the gnome, Theodore the wyvern, and Chauncey, an amorphous blob whose parentage is unknown. The proprietor of the orphanage is a strange but charming man named Arthur, who makes it clear to Linus that he will do anything in his power to give his charges a loving home on the island. As Linus spends more time with Arthur and the kids, he starts to question a world that would shun them for being different, and he even develops romantic feelings for Arthur. Lambda Literary Award–winning author Klune (The Art of Breathing, 2019, etc.) has a knack for creating endearing characters, and readers will grow to love Arthur and the orphans alongside Linus. Linus himself is a lovable protagonist despite his prickliness, and Klune aptly handles his evolving feelings and morals. The prose is a touch wooden in places, but fans of quirky fantasy will eat it up.
A breezy and fun contemporary fantasy.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21728-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
PERSPECTIVES
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