A diverting if heavy-handed entry for series fans.
Zephrum Gates and her friends are back and must confront the rising evil that threatens all of humanity.
In Riel’s third novel in the Zephrum Gates series, Zephrum believes the evil Strasidous Rowpe to be vanquished, but she soon learns that the villain has risen from the dead after merging body and mind with a goblin. Now renamed Virgidous, he is out to gain ultimate power over all things and to finally capture Zephrum. Virgidous learns from notorious goblin seer Grizalda the Great that his plan for world domination will only work with the help of the infamous Zephrum. Meanwhile, Zephrum and her friends return for a new school year at the Fiddlesticks School for Alternative Thinkers With Unusual Abilities. Between lessons on “Circus Art,” “Forecasting the Future Through Mathematical Trends,” and “Oceanography,” Zephrum has to learn to wield her power to control the wind while saving the world with the help of her friends and an unlikely ally. Zephrum comes to face her worst fears, meets new dangers, and faces old foes. She also falls a little bit in love with her dreamy friend Gai Holmes. Middle-grade readers familiar with Riel’s series will be better served by this fantasy novel than those completely new to it. Zephrum’s strong friendships with other girls at school and her earnest encounter with first love are the novel’s core strengths. Other elements offer ongoing appeal: the characters’ names (Sarah Bellum, Daphne Gumption, Misty Falls, to name a few), the silliness of its cackling villain with his absolutely nonsensical plan, and the adult characters who fumble helplessly along. Despite embracing its silly side, the novel maintains a weighty environmental message and kills off a beloved dog, creating an uneven narrative tone. Instances of clunky writing (“thought Zephrum in her mind”) jar but don’t fully ruin the experience.
A diverting if heavy-handed entry for series fans.Pub Date: Sept. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-578-75557-1
Page Count: 353
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Legibility issue aside, required reading for flights that will be as safe as they are exhilarating.
A savvy instruction manual for new magic-carpet owners.
Packaged with “Mosby’s Model D3 Extra-Small Magic Carpet, Especially for Young or Vertically Challenged People” (actual carpet not included, alas), this handy guide gathers a wealth of necessary advice and information. This includes commands programmed in by the manufacturer’s “magicalists,” notes on proper care and storage, best practices for safe flying, aerial hazards, suggested recreational activities, basic survival techniques, and even career possibilities. There’s so much here, in fact, that the pages are stuffed nearly edge to edge with text in a cramped, fussy typeface. Blocks of text are wedged in around cartoon illustrations of buildings and natural features seen from above, views of a racially diverse cast of young carpet riders, and (this particular copy being actually a hand-me-down from an elderly great-aunt) handwritten additions in red ink, e.g.: “Barf stains on a carpet can be exceedingly difficult to clean.” In and around the fun are tidbits of actual information, such as the varying G-forces experienced by a child swinging, sneezing, and riding a roller coaster, the varying altitudes of flyers from bugs and bats to commercial jets, samplings from world cuisines, and orienteering. Despite cultural associations, Mossby’s wares are fairly untrammeled by Middle Eastern stereotypes.
Legibility issue aside, required reading for flights that will be as safe as they are exhilarating. (Informational fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943147-28-1
Page Count: 40
Publisher: The Innovation Press
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
A reasonably comprehensive handbook, though it’s confined to classical low- to no-tech methods.
Simple directions for using codes, ciphers, and steganography to send secret messages to friends or fellow spies.
After opening with an overview of historical cryptography from the “Caesar cipher” and an ancient Chinese script called Nushu (used exclusively by women) to the Enigma machine and other World War II–era coding devices, Hunt proceeds to describe over two dozen ways to hide or disguise messages. Along with substitution codes, letter and number grids, anagrams, a tic-tac-toe cipher, a Vigenère table, and like techniques, she provides recipes for invisible ink, instructions for creating paper decoder bracelets or rings, and templates to copy for an Alberti cipher wheel. Most of the illustrations are charts or simple line drawings, with a sprinkling of human figures (all seem to be white). The author adds frequent practice pages with blank lines and short secret messages to decode, and she closes with a series of longer puzzles (answer key included) in a final “Cryptographic Challenge.” But young would-be coders hoping to find more than passing nods to computer programs or cellphone tools—or even that much about modern advances in cryptography—will be disappointed.
A reasonably comprehensive handbook, though it’s confined to classical low- to no-tech methods. (sources) (Nonfiction. 10-12)Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-60286-339-2
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Weinstein Books
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
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