An intriguing premise, but it’s too cramped and cryptic to reach its full potential.
From a floating, dream-proof Safe House, a diverse squad intrepidly issues forth to rescue children from attacks of nightmares in this melodramatic, rather confusing graphic outing.
Missions include snatching one child away from a torrent of mice and others from endless falling, impenetrable darkness, an N.I.P. (“Naked in Public”) scenario and a bellowing red monster. Against this backdrop, three overworked sheep create a sock monkey named Amali, Sophia, a bird with a pen-nib head, and tubby Bonifacius, a grumpy bear sporting a Mexican wrestler’s headpiece as successors before retiring through a one-way door. The narrative vertigo in this passing-of-the-torch tale caused by multiple cast changes and forays into dreamscapes subject to surreal twists and sudden transformations is only intensified by Schwarz’s splashy, sketchy art—which occupies small panels further crammed with sound effects and dialogue balloons. A closing museum visit set in the waking world has, at best, a tangential relationship to the rest of the story.
An intriguing premise, but it’s too cramped and cryptic to reach its full potential. (Graphic fantasy. 10-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6230-1
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A flying start for a series that puts in a strong bid for Magic Treehouse grads.
Two free-range 25th-century children get into and out of pickles while tagging along with their research-scientist parents to various past eras.
In this series opener, a prank involving Hannibal’s elephants and a mouse lands the Faradays in hot water with their employer, the Cosmos Institute. They are consequently sent for punishment to 1648 Prague to educate Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand III about fashions in footwear. Instantly bored for understandable reasons, teenage sibs Dawkins and Hypatia fall in with Jan Richthausen, an alchemist who actually can turn mercury into gold—using found technology more advanced than the Faradays’ own. Somebody is meddling dangerously. In sharp contrast to most authors who try their hand at time-travel tales, Seven has plainly thought out consistent and (reasonably) plausible ways for his characters to interact with the past without causing paradoxes or catastrophic changes to the future. Though everyone in every era speaks the same colloquial English and the source of the futuristic devices and substances is never revealed in this setup episode, the author does propel Dawk, Hype and his other lively characters through a rousing multicentury chase that loops back around to close with tantalizing hints of adventures to come.
A flying start for a series that puts in a strong bid for Magic Treehouse grads. (Science fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62370-011-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Capstone Young Readers
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
There’s action aplenty, and belly laughs too—though the implication that benders have played significant roles in history...
An unsettling premise and wildly escalating threats jump-start Korman’s newest series.
Jackson Opus is uneasy about his ability to, sometimes, make people do exactly what he tells them to—until he’s invited to join a training program at the mysterious Sentia Institute, where he learns that he’s an uncommonly gifted member of a rare but not unknown breed of natural-born “mind-benders.” Initially dazzled by the glittering promises of world-changing powers offered by Sentia’s founder, Elias Mako, Jax soon gets the feeling that Mako has a hidden agenda. That feeling becomes a certainty after Jax meets the Sandman’s Guild, an underclass of benders struggling with the ability’s addictive lure, and records a video for, supposedly, experimental purposes that hypnotizes anyone who sees it. Despite such tongue-in-cheek highlights as a guild meeting modeled on an AA support group and a “Sorcerer’s Apprentice”–style scene in the wake of a string of badly worded hypnotic commands, the story takes a suspenseful turn. Jax discovers that his own parents have been implanted with a deadly posthypnotic command to keep him in line and that Mako has “bent” the leading U.S. presidential candidate.
There’s action aplenty, and belly laughs too—though the implication that benders have played significant roles in history and are among us now may leave readers feeling queasy. (Suspense fantasy. 10-13)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-50322-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
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