Readers will be flushed with excitement to follow Mac’s operations from the fourth stall.
Someone’s out to destroy Mac’s middle school, and Mac must find a way to stop him.
Christian Barrett, called “Mac” after the television secret agent MacGyver, is a problem-solver, operating out of the fourth stall in the East Wing boys’ bathroom in his middle school. For a price, he helps fellow students with their problems: taking care of a bully, forging hall passes, selling test answers, providing completed homework and selling prewritten research papers. And now an eighth-grade girl comes walking into Mac’s “office” and wants Mac to take care of a mean teacher trying to get her expelled. But there’s “something almost predatory” about this girl, like a rattlesnake, and Mac feels “like a small white mouse or whatever it is that rattlesnakes eat.” Her story doesn’t quite add up, and in trying to solve her problem, Mac both uncovers larger evil afoot and finds Vice Principal George breathing down his neck. This second installment does better than its predecessor at building and sustaining intrigue, as Mac and his right-hand man Vince must put a stop to Dr. George’s evil machinations, even if it means putting himself and his business in jeopardy.
Readers will be flushed with excitement to follow Mac’s operations from the fourth stall. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-199630-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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An environmental mystery featuring lots of clever detecting, a bit of danger, and real felonies to investigate.
Toxic waste dumped in the Everglades gives a quartet of middle school sleuths their first case.
Leading Carl Hiaasen fans over familiar ground, Ponti pitches 12-year-old Alex Sherlock and his 13-year-old sister, Zoe, with school friends Lina and Yadi as sidekicks, into a summer caper. It all begins with the hunt for a supposed fortune buried decades ago by Al Capone, culminates in a narrow escape from an exploding yacht, and ultimately exposes a smooth-talking bad actor shady enough to bring in even federal authorities. As the kids’ live-in Grandpa, a retired investigative reporter, delivers pointers on how to conduct interviews and sift evidence while grandly driving them around South Florida in his classic Cadillac, Roberta, the budding detectives display sharp wits, eyes, and negotiating skills. The last come in particularly useful when they’re dealing with their lawyer…who’s also their mom. Both the plot and the chain of evidence take logical courses, and since Dad is a marine biologist and Lina’s a recent transplant from Wyoming, Ponti is able to use their dialogue to highlight the local culture and larger ecological issues. Main characters present white, apart from tech wiz Yadi, who is cued Latine.
An environmental mystery featuring lots of clever detecting, a bit of danger, and real felonies to investigate. (Mystery. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2024
ISBN: 9781665932530
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
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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