Fred Flintstone would feel right at home in this light-as-pumice comedy.
A Stone Age comedy features a caveboy guilty of “uncavemanlike behavior.”
The summary exile that Lug earns by failing to capture a “jungle llama” to ride in an upcoming headstone match turns out to be a blessing in disguise, as it leads to a meeting with Hamela—a member of the rival Boar Rider clan who has turned from the customary all-dodo diet to vegetarianism. She in turn introduces him to Woolly, an errant young mammoth atop whom he goes on to lead his headstone team to victory. Lug lands in further hot water when his forbidden cave paintings are discovered—but following the arrival of snow, a pride of saber tooth tigers and more mammoths, he manages to convince at least some of his simpleminded people that big changes are coming. By the end, he even has them using fire (“storm light”). The animals all talk (except the dodos), and Lug’s frog-licking proto-hippie sidekick leads a notably rock-headed supporting cast. Happily, characters speak in complete sentences and with standard syntax, and the banter is nicely snappy. Preliminary sketches indicate that suitably primitive art will accompany the story.
Fred Flintstone would feel right at home in this light-as-pumice comedy. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60684-513-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Egmont USA
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
The journey is even gently funny—Omakayas’s brother spends much of the year with a porcupine on his head. Charming and...
This third entry in the Birchbark House series takes Omakayas and her family west from their home on the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker, away from land the U.S. government has claimed.
Difficulties abound; the unknown landscape is fraught with danger, and they are nearing hostile Bwaanag territory. Omakayas’s family is not only close, but growing: The travelers adopt two young chimookoman (white) orphans along the way. When treachery leaves them starving and alone in a northern Minnesota winter, it will take all of their abilities and love to survive. The heartwarming account of Omakayas’s year of travel explores her changing family relationships and culminates in her first moon, the onset of puberty. It would be understandable if this darkest-yet entry in Erdrich’s response to the Little House books were touched by bitterness, yet this gladdening story details Omakayas’s coming-of-age with appealing optimism.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-029787-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
Epic—in plot, not length—and as wise and wonderful as Gerald Morris’ Arthurian exploits.
Who needs dragons when there are Terrible Lizards to be fought?
Having recklessly boasted to King Arthur and the court that he’d slain 40 dragons, Sir Erec can hardly refuse when Merlin offers him more challenging foes…and so it is that in no time (so to speak), Erec, with bookish Sir Hector, the silent and enigmatic Black Knight, and blustering Sir Bors with his thin but doughty squire, Mel, in tow, are hewing away at fearsome creatures sporting natural armor and weapons every bit as effective as knightly ones. Happily, while all the glorious mashing and bashing leads to awesome feats aplenty—who would suspect that a ravening T. Rex could be decked by a well-placed punch to the jaw?—when the dust settles neither bloodshed nor permanent injury has been dealt to either side. Better yet, not even the stunning revelation that two of the Three Stooges–style bumblers aren’t what they seem (“Anyone else here a girl?”) keeps the questers from developing into a well-knit team capable of repeatedly saving one another’s bacon. Phelan endows the all-white human cast with finely drawn, eloquently expressive faces but otherwise works in a loose, movement-filled style, pitting his clanking crew against an almost nonstop onslaught of toothy monsters in a monochrome mix of single scenes and occasional wordless sequential panels.
Epic—in plot, not length—and as wise and wonderful as Gerald Morris’ Arthurian exploits. (Graphic/fantasy hybrid. 9-11)Pub Date: Oct. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-268623-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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