A debut that marks the author as an exciting storyteller to watch.
Cryptic directions from her mother lead Yara Sulimayah from England to a magical world.
Upon her death, Yara’s mother leaves her instructions for reaching another world—the city of Zehaira, where she’ll find the sorceress Leyla Khatoun. Although skeptical, Yara’s also desperate to learn more about her and her mother’s past (on paper, they’re from Iraq). She finds an alternate world where the Sultan has sided with the alchemists, banning magic and forcing the sorcerers into hiding through a brutal Inquisition. On her journey to find Leyla, Yara overhears evidence of a dangerous plot to wipe out sorcerers for good. But Leyla, rather than helping her as her mother promised, is busy keeping a secret sorcerer settlement running and is uninterested in the city sorcerers’ woes. Yara must crack through Leyla’s self-protective mechanisms and convince her of the existential threat coming their way, all the while trying to get Leyla to spill the secrets Yara’s mother kept. That Yara ends up having (unconventional) magic of her own might be expected, but by then readers will have already formed an attachment to the determined, bighearted hero. The setting—an Arab-coded world that simmers with magic—is richly described and populated by complex people and jinn. The ending wraps the action up a bit abruptly but looks forward to more dangers and adventures in the sequel.
A debut that marks the author as an exciting storyteller to watch. (Fantasy. 8-14)Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9781665931083
Page Count: 336
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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