by Todd Strasser ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 26, 2021
Clumsy storytelling with a lesson: Adults must explicitly educate kids about hate groups.
A middle school eSports club brings the worst of video gaming’s subcultures into the classroom.
In poor, mostly White, mostly Christian Ironville, teacher Ms. B starts up an eSports club. The students compete in The Good War, a World War II shooter that pits Axis against Allies. A shifting point of view introduces the misfits who make up the Allies and one of the bullies who make up the Axis. Playacting Nazis creeps into the Axis team’s behavior; they wear red T-shirts with an SS–style lightning bolt and make Nazi salutes. In Ironville, lacking people of color and Jews, these seventh graders don’t understand their behavior isn’t funny. The worst bully, Crosby, meets a friendly older gamer on a Discord channel who feeds him Nazi, racist, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic, misogynist hatred between bouts of gameplay. Crosby’s radicalization includes profoundly horrific real-world concepts, including an Adolf Hitler slogan and a White nationalist group that actively recruits online. Binaries abound. Explicit refutation of some of the more virulent garbage comes from the Ironville adults while intentional bigotry all originates from non-Ironvillians. None of these kids sees open bigotry at home, and Ms. B. takes it as a given that the eventual racism must have originated online. Tell-not-show narrative and the constantly shifting perspective distance readers from characters. Contemporary referents such as Twitch and Discord are welcome; sadly, they appear alongside rantings about “blue-pill snowflakes” and “Feminazis.”
Clumsy storytelling with a lesson: Adults must explicitly educate kids about hate groups. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-30780-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
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by Katherine Rundell ; illustrated by Charles Santoso ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 27, 2019
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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by Katherine Rundell ; illustrated by Kristjana S. Williams
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by Katherine Rundell ; illustrated by Emily Sutton
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by Trenton Lee Stewart ; illustrated by Manu Montoya ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2019
Clever as ever—if slow off the mark—and positively laden with tics, quirks, and puns.
When deadly minions of archvillain Ledroptha Curtain escape from prison, the talented young protégés of his twin brother, Nicholas Benedict, reunite for a new round of desperate ploys and ingenious trickery.
Stewart sets the reunion of cerebral Reynie Muldoon Perumal, hypercapable Kate Wetherall, shy scientific genius George “Sticky” Washington, and spectacularly sullen telepath Constance Contraire a few years after the previous episode, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (2009). Providing relief from the quartet’s continual internecine squabbling and self-analysis, he trucks in Tai Li, a grubby, precociously verbal 5-year-old orphan who also happens to be telepathic. (Just to even the playing field a bit, the bad guys get a telepath too.) Series fans will know to be patient in wading through all the angst, arguments, and flurries of significant nose-tapping (occasionally in unison), for when the main action does at long last get under way—the five don’t even set out from Mr. Benedict’s mansion together until more than halfway through—the Society returns to Nomansan Island (get it?), the site of their first mission, for chases, narrow squeaks, hastily revised stratagems, and heroic exploits that culminate in a characteristically byzantine whirl of climactic twists, triumphs, and revelations. Except for brown-skinned George and olive-complected, presumably Asian-descended Tai, the central cast defaults to white; Reynie’s adoptive mother is South Asian.
Clever as ever—if slow off the mark—and positively laden with tics, quirks, and puns. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-45264-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Megan Tingley/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
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