A fun, inclusive adventure.
Four Black eighth graders order limited-edition enamel pins featuring fantasy characters Princess P and Swanson T Swan—and unknowingly get superpowers, too.
Angela, Skylar, Travis, and Sophie, kids from different parts of the same city in Florida, are thrown together after an explosion literally rocks their world. They’re each wrestling with different concerns: Angela is worried about her dad and his fiancee, who work at local theme park FUNTASTIC PLAINS. Angela’s friend Skylar, who uses they/them pronouns, has been shouldering a lot of responsibilities since their dad lost his job. Travis is holding on to a secret crush as well as hiding from his grandfather the fact that he’s thinking of giving up track for video game design. And Sophie is no longer keeping quiet about wanting a life of her own, not one where she shares every experience with her twin sister. The middle schoolers, whose superpowers ultimately align with what they need to become their most authentic selves, pursue the mystery of where the pins came from and how they’re tied to the theme park’s expansion. Lawrence creates a community in which the characters are, for the most part, supported in who they want to be, and queer kids and their families thrive. Although the action moves at a steady pace, the awkward, stilted dialogue interrupts the flow of the story. Spot art and occasional full-page illustrations show characters with a range of body types and skin tones.
A fun, inclusive adventure. (Fantasy. 10-13)Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781524880705
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
A half-baked jumble of poorly connected themes, incidents, and tropes.
Eleven-year-old Georgie sets out to the rescue after seeing his dad snatched into thin air by a hideous figure.
In a confusing debut that reads like a first draft, the kidnapping impels the young slingshot expert to go from doggedly enduring vicious bullying at school to intrepidly plunging after his father through a portal to Scatterplot, an otherworldly realm where the memories of everyone in New York are uploaded by omnilingual Scribes. Classmates Apurva Aluwhalia (who’s cued South Asian) and Roscoe Harris (who reads Black and is confined to a role that’s largely limited to comic relief), each motivated by their own concerns, follow white-presenting Georgie on his adventure. In Scatterplot, they must remain alert for the “tribe” of “bad people” called Altercockers, formed by the exiled Rollie D. Meanwhile, Flint Eldritch, the menacing figure who was responsible for Georgie’s father’s disappearance, is bent on using the Aetherquill, a magical pen that can rewrite reality in unpredictable ways, to replace all those recorded memories with fake ones. In a story that’s marred by stilted dialogue, flat characterization, and awkward turns of phrase, Georgie and his friends, along with Scatterplot siblings Edie and Ore, embark on a quest to save both his father and the entire realm. The puss-oozing, misshapen villain Flint, crawling with bugs, does at least provide a memorably lurid element of horror. The novel ends with an abrupt cliffhanger.
A half-baked jumble of poorly connected themes, incidents, and tropes. (Fantasy. 10-13)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798886453164
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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