Panicked, Charlie sets off to find his kidnapped scientist parents in this adventurous romp set in a future England when pollution has banned cars, closed schools, and created an asthma epidemic. A network of cats enables Charlie, who speaks Cat, to stow away on a river police launch, hook up with a floating circus on a ship bound for Paris, help six lions escape captivity, via the city’s canals, and board a train for Venice, where he thinks his black father and white mother are being held. The tension builds like Christie’s Orient Express, as a snow avalanche stalls the train and King Boris of Bulgaria stymies the villains chasing the lions and Charlie. Abrupt as a TV thriller that flashes “To Be Continued,” this first in a trilogy screeches to a halt at a cliff-hanging moment, with those very words. This inventive cat-and-mouse game combines hi-jinks with messages of mixed marriages, greedy pharmaceutical conglomerates, and environmentally caused allergies. The lion-face cover and clever cat device set the pace and impel the plot. Intriguing. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-8037-2982-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Compelling and accessible.
Steven must fight for his own life as well as for his baby brother’s when he’s offered a chance to exchange human life for something better.
Steve has figured out strategies to cope with many of his anxieties and OCD behaviors, but this summer the pressure is on. Readers see through Steve’s eyes his parents' fears for the new baby, whose congenital health issues are complicated and unusual. Readers may find parallels with Skelligin the sibling anxiety and the odd encounter with a winged creature—but here the stranger is part of something sinister indeed. “We’ve come to help,” assures the winged, slightly ethereal being who offers a solution to Steven in a dream. “We come when people are scared or in trouble. We come when there’s grief.” Oppel deftly conveys the fear and dislocation that can overwhelm a family: there’s the baby born with problems, the ways that affects the family, and Steve’s own struggles to feel and be normal. Everything feels a bit skewed, conveying the experience of being in transition from the familiar to the threateningly unfamiliar. Klassen’s several illustrations in graphite, with their linear formality and stillness and only mere glimpses of people, nicely express this sense of worry and tension. Steve’s battle with the enemy is terrifying, moving from an ominous, baleful verbal conflict to a pitched, physical, life-threatening battle.
Compelling and accessible. (Fantasy. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4814-3232-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
A lighter-than-air blend of knightly exploits and rib-tickling twists.
Princess Grace of Merryland needs rescuing again, forcing two young knights-in-training to face a series of challenges, from hungry cave sharks to a minotaur named Chad.
Actually, Princess Grace is perfectly capable of rescuing herself—again: see Once Upon a Tim (2022)—except that this time, kidnappers have stashed her in a room that’s locked and bolted on the outside…and in the middle of a maze billed, supposedly, as “the most complex and dastardly labyrinth in the world.” So it is that former peasants Tim and his more capable friend Bull—otherwise known as Belinda when she’s not disguised as a boy—plunge into a mess of dark and bewildering tunnels, armed with a ball of twine provided by the surprisingly sapient village idiot Ferkle, to face a series of deadly threats…though the most legendary of all turns out to be an amiable monster with the body of a bull and the head of, well, a dude. Throughout Gibbs’ lighthearted, laugh-out-loud tale, Curtis supplies proper notes of farce or stark terror as appropriate in flurries of line drawings that present most of the humans and the monsters with human features as White, though Belinda appears to present as Black. Along the way, Tim adds educational value to his narrative by flagging and then pausing to define vocabulary-building words like laborious and vexing.
A lighter-than-air blend of knightly exploits and rib-tickling twists. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5344-9928-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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