In this sequel to Lockie Leonard, Human Torpedo (1992), Winton continues to chronicle the tempestuous life of 13-year-old Lockie, Australian surfer kid and lover. Lockie keeps falling in love, this time with a girl who’s a better surfer than he is, and who, to his embarrassment, is 11. He is responsible when his unlikely new best friend and minister’s son, Egg, gets into metal music and all-black clothing. The ostensible plot involves Lockie and Egg’s attempts to prod their indifferent town into cleaning up the nauseating pollution in their harbor. That easily won environmental battle is the only part of the book that doesn’t work, but Winton’s quirky characterizations fuel the real thrust of the book: laugh-out-loud scenes as Lockie struggles with being 13. Winton knows surfing, understands adolescence, and exhibits great comic pacing; he’s a flat-out good writer, and this is a flat-out funny book. (Fiction. 8-13)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-689-82247-2
Page Count: 140
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Bartlett doesn’t allow readers not to like her artwork, with the brio and dash of her thick colors and the instant appeal of her characters’ faces. The same applies to Doherty’s trim little story, which is full of enjoyable word play. Paddiwak, a cat and “a heartthrob (quite a snob), very smart in his neat black suit,” rules his roost until the day, that “terrible day,” when Sally brings home another cat, and what a cat: “A laugh of a cat, a dumpling cat with a black bit here and a white bit there, floppy round the tummy and great big paws.” Paddiwak takes grave offense, hisses, and leaves, huffing that he will never return. The new cat explores timidly, while Paddiwak stews outside. Just when the new cat is feeling really lonely and blue, the dark and the rain suggest to Paddiwak that he end his self-imposed exile. He is sodden and rumpled as he sneaks into a favorite den and finds “something as cuddly as a cushion to lay his head on.” That’s the new cat, now called Cozy, and so is the story, where a cat can act like a fool without being condemned as one, as long as he knows when to come in out of the rain. (Picture book. 3-6)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-531-30180-X
Page Count: 28
Publisher: Orchard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
This America at Work entry features cartoon illustrations of a smiling family on a trip “out east” to a Junior Miners’ hockey tournament. The mother works in a molybdenum mine, the father works in a steel mill, and parental offers to take their twins to work meet with great approval. Even readers unfamiliar with the series may surmise, rightly, that this is going to be a wordy ride through material that may or may not be useful in writing school reports. Cutaway charts intended to support the hackneyed premise do little to clarify the goings on in an underground mine; two miners in hard hats who are “making the roof safe,” for example, shore up a shaft with what appear to be automatic weapons with tiny flying buttresses set on the shaft’s floor. The topic-driven trip includes visits to a steel mill, an airplane ride, an oil well, a toxic dump, a picnic in a park that was once a coal pit, and ends in a hockey arena, with the kids asking all the right questions to keep the facts flowing. They count things made from steel or oil in an “interactivity” befitting the automaton-like nature of progeny who actually let their mother get away with lecturing, “At a smelter, the bits of molybdenum ore are heated and refined to form a powder of pure molybdenum.” (index) (Picture book. 7-10)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-55074-508-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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