Dinosaurs break out of their terrarium confines, taking two brothers for a wild ride, in this junior Jurassic Park from Griffith (Dream Meadow, 1994, etc.). Every kid’s dinosaur daydream becomes reality when 12-year-old Nathan tosses younger brother Ryan’s fossilized egg across the room, where it lands in the center of Ryan’s terrarium. As mist envelops the bedroom, desks and chairs recede and carpets become squishy; the boys find themselves lost in a larger-than-life swampy, volcanic habitat, whose rollicking, rampaging residents are giant dinosaurs and insects. Nathan and Ryan easily accept their situation in the face of immediate danger from an ornery coelophysis, a reptilian home-wrecker who steals a mother hadrosaur’s nest eggs; each brief, subsequent episode introduces a new dinosaur, anticipated by Ryan, who knows the attributes of the plastic creatures from his terrarium. Despite a repetitive plot, Griffith competently varies the action and description of the boys’ alternating thrill and terror in the face of such creatures as a “gigantic, glittering carnivore,” or the threat of a lava-spewing volcano. Some irksome banter between the brothers—Nathan constantly muddling dinosaur names with Ryan just as regularly correcting him—doesn’t detract from the screeches, wails, and shrieks that will certainly entice newly independent readers into the pages. (b&w illustrations, not seen) (Fiction. 8-11)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-688-15324-0
Page Count: 97
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
A fizzy mix of low humor and brisk action, with promise of more of both to come.
Heroic deeds await Isaac after his little sister runs into the school basement and is captured by elves.
Even though their school is a spooky old castle transplanted stone by stone from Germany, Isaac and his two friends, Max and Emma, little suspect that an entire magical kingdom lies beneath—a kingdom run by elves, policed by oversized rats in uniform, and populated by captives who start out human but undergo transformative “weirding.” These revelations await Isaac and sidekicks as they nerve themselves to trail his bossy younger sib, Lily, through a shadowy storeroom and into a tunnel, across a wide lake, and into a city lit by half-human fireflies, where they are cast together into a dungeon. Can they escape before they themselves start changing? Gibson pits his doughty rescuers against such adversaries as an elven monarch who emits truly kingly belches and a once-human jailer with a self-picking nose. Tests of mettle range from a riddle contest to a face-off with the menacing head rat Shelfliver, and a helter-skelter chase finally leads rescuers and rescued back to the aboveground. Plainly, though, there is further rescuing to be done.
A fizzy mix of low humor and brisk action, with promise of more of both to come. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62370-255-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Capstone Young Readers
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
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