An excellent choice for young readers eager for a suspenseful, emotionally satisfying fantasy adventure.
A heroic teenage girl uncovers ghosts, a strange radioactive substance and interdimensional travel in Graham’s debut young-adult novel.
Thomasville, Maine, has been experiencing extremely bizarre weather. For the past month, the sun has been completely obscured by dark clouds, and the rain hasn’t let up. Thirteen-year-old Sophina Murray’s neighbor and former mentor, Mrs. Tanner, seems to be at the center of it all. When Sophina's younger brother and other local children are kidnapped by a strange, hooded figure carrying a glowing rock, she begins an investigation of her own in an attempt to put her family back together. Graham’s writing deftly evokes the story’s atmosphere, setting the tone beautifully from the start with a haunting description of Thomasville’s rain-swept terrain; a sense of mystery and danger permeates the prose. Meanwhile, Sophina is a brave, intelligent heroine for young readers to follow. She takes everything in stride that comes her way—even traveling to the parallel alien dimension, Trellah. The recent death of Sophina's father casts a dark shadow over her life, which the grim occurrences of the past month thematically mirror; Sophina’s strong sense of courage stems from her desire to spare her mother another loss. Beyond the interesting premise, there’s not much to differentiate this novel from other titles in the genre. Trellah is not a unique fantasy world, and the novel’s plot twists are rather predictable. The book, however, does exhibit fine character development and powerful dramatic tension.
An excellent choice for young readers eager for a suspenseful, emotionally satisfying fantasy adventure.Pub Date: March 10, 2012
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 229
Publisher: Jagged Coast Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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