This story of a psychically gifted eleven-year-old girl and her coming into her powers is the first in a trilogy, and much of the story, too, seems a setting-up for bigger things to come. The story has two strains: on the realistic level, Justice fiercely anticipates the Great Snake Race for which her brother Tom is organizing the neighborhood boys; she practices secretly for a bike trick she will perform for them all on the way to the snake swamp; and, it turns out, she misunderstands the terms of the race, which almost leads to her mortifying embarrassment. The other current, the supersensory one, begins with Justice's suspicion of a psychic bond between her older twin brothers, and we glimpse its nature as cruel Tom-Tom enters and controls brother Levy's mind. This is intriguing; but the sudden leap to Justice's being trained in mind power by a neighboring, adult Sensitive lands us, less seductively, in the realm of believe-it-or-not science fiction. The Sensitive's son Dorian has powers also—but his mother's suggestion that he should have intervened to save Justice's face in the snake race would seem a trivial misuse of them. In the end, the four special children—Justice, her brothers, and Dorian—sit with clasped hands as Justice explains, by mind-tracing, that "we four are the first unit," presaging a future in which everyone must be so joined. Tom of course resents Justice's newly revealed superior powers (but one feels for him for the first time when he complains, "I won't become a unit. I'll be me, alone, if I have to"). There will, it is suggested, be trouble from him and serious illness for Levy in future volumes. Perhaps now that Hamilton has assembled her unit, we can look forward to its pioneering ventures.
Pub Date: Oct. 16, 1978
ISBN: 0590362143
Page Count: 282
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1978
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Fans both young and formerly young will be pleased—100 percent.
Published in magazines, never seen since / Now resurrected for pleasure intense / Versified episodes numbering four / Featuring Marco, and Horton and more!
All of the entries in this follow-up to The Bippolo Seed and Other Lost Stories (2011) involve a certain amount of sharp dealing. Horton carries a Kwuggerbug through crocodile-infested waters and up a steep mountain because “a deal is a deal”—and then is cheated out of his promised share of delicious Beezlenuts. Officer Pat heads off escalating, imagined disasters on Mulberry Street by clubbing a pesky gnat. Marco (originally met on that same Mulberry Street) concocts a baroque excuse for being late to school. In the closer, a smooth-talking Grinch (not the green sort) sells a gullible Hoobub a piece of string. In a lively introduction, uber-fan Charles D. Cohen (The Seuss, The Whole Seuss, and Nothing but the Seuss, 2002) provides publishing histories, places characters and settings in Seussian context, and offers insights into, for instance, the origin of “Grinch.” Along with predictably engaging wordplay—“He climbed. He grew dizzy. His ankles grew numb. / But he climbed and he climbed and he clum and he clum”—each tale features bright, crisply reproduced renditions of its original illustrations. Except for “The Hoobub and the Grinch,” which has been jammed into a single spread, the verses and pictures are laid out in spacious, visually appealing ways.
Fans both young and formerly young will be pleased—100 percent. (Picture book. 6-9)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-38298-4
Page Count: 56
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Blume's latest novel begins like many of her personalized, single-problem scenarios, with 15-year-old Davey's father shot to death by robbers at his 7-Eleven store in Atlantic City. Davey can't function for weeks, and it is largely for her that her emotionally and financially stranded mother accepts shelter in Los Alamos with kind Aunt Bitsy and her physicist-husband Walter. Once there, Davey's outsider reactions to Bitsy, Walter, and Los Alamos add dimension to her grief and her recovery. True, we experience no culture shock too strong for Blume's smooth readability; there is nothing subtle about the irony of Bomb City's bland security and weapons designer Waiter's overprotective posture; and Waiter's elitist ugliness is overdone in one violent confrontation with Davey. Also, Davey's chaste but warm relationship with a nice young man she meets in the canyon, plus the coincidence of his father's dying at the hospital where Davey volunteers as a candy-striper, are on the cute romantic level. Nevertheless Davey's lonely struggle to come to terms with the killing, her everyday conflicts with her well-meaning but aggravating aunt and uncle, her impatience with her mother, who finally breaks down and then withdraws from the family, her scorn for the "nerd" physicist Mom dates on her way to recovery, her concern for a high-status but alcoholic school friend, and her assessment of the social structure at the Los Alamos high school—all this takes on a poignancy and a visible edge we wouldn't see had Davey (or Blume) remained in New Jersey.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1982
ISBN: 0385739893
Page Count: 225
Publisher: Bradbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1982
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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