In a lackluster fantasy set generations after a meteorite's fall, Jon, Lin, and Kyra escape a besieged city and hope for a fresh start in their Ancient Land. Avoiding packs of savage dogs and the descendants of plague survivors known as Fen, the threesome retrace the path their ancestors took long ago. Few of their encounters advance the plot or make a point, except, perhaps, on some vague symbolic level; the same could be said of the black-and- white illustrations, although these are evocative unto themselves. Myers (The Story of the Three Kingdoms, p. 540, etc.) is unusually careless with details: The refugees don't need much food beyond the narcotic sorpos fruit; Jon risks his life to steal a healing herb when Lin falls ill, but no mention is made of administering it; a dog killed on one page is only injured on the next. Kyra runs off to kill Fen while Jon and Lin try to befriend two of them, but since Fen characters and society haven't been developed, this intimacy is a surprise. Other fantasies in which verisimilitude is a low priority, such as Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993) or Gregory Maguire's I Feel Like The Morning Star (1989), compensate with passionate messages; here the lessons are buried beneath indifferent storytelling. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-590-45895-7
Page Count: 183
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
Much rousing sturm und drang, though what’s left after the dust settles is a heap of glittering but disparate good parts...
Scott tops off his deservedly popular series with a heaping shovelful of monster attacks, heroic last stands, earthquakes and other geological events, magic-working, millennia-long schemes coming to fruition, hearts laid bare, family revelations, transformations, redemptions and happy endings (for those deserving them).
Multiple plotlines—some of which, thanks to time travel, feature the same characters and even figures killed off in previous episodes—come to simultaneous heads in a whirl of short chapters. Flamel and allies (including Prometheus and Billy the Kid) defend modern San Francisco from a motley host of mythological baddies. Meanwhile, in ancient Danu Talis (aka Atlantis), Josh and Sophie are being swept into a play to bring certain Elders to power as the city’s downtrodden “humani” population rises up behind Virginia Dare, the repentant John Dee and other Immortals and Elders. The cast never seems unwieldy despite its size, the pacing never lets up, and the individual set pieces are fine mixtures of sudden action, heroic badinage and cliffhanger cutoffs. As a whole, though, the tale collapses under its own weight as the San Francisco subplots turn out to be no more than an irrelevant sideshow, and climactic conflicts take place on an island that is somehow both a historical, physical place and a higher reality from which Earth and other “shadowrealms” are spun off.
Much rousing sturm und drang, though what’s left after the dust settles is a heap of glittering but disparate good parts rather than a cohesive whole. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-385-73535-3
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
If it were a Golden Age comic, this tale of ridiculous science, space dogs and humanoid aliens with flashlights in their hands might not be bad. Alas... Number Four is a fugitive from the planet Lorien, which is sloppily described as both "hundreds of lightyears away" and "billions of miles away." Along with eight other children and their caretakers, Number Four escaped from the Mogadorian invasion of Lorien ten years ago. Now the nine children are scattered on Earth, hiding. Luckily and fairly nonsensically, the planet's Elders cast a charm on them so they could only be killed in numerical order, but children one through three are dead, and Number Four is next. Too bad he's finally gained a friend and a girlfriend and doesn't want to run. At least his newly developing alien powers means there will be screen-ready combat and explosions. Perhaps most idiotic, "author" Pittacus Lore is a character in this fiction—but the first-person narrator is someone else entirely. Maybe this is a natural extension of lightly hidden actual author James Frey's drive to fictionalize his life, but literature it ain't. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196955-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
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