Gridiron heroics in space, with spotlights on the personal and collective value of team play.
With ownership of the entire Earth at stake, a seemingly random group of young athletes is tasked with winning an intergalactic football tournament.
Because everyone chosen for the Planet Earth Defenders team is under 14 and none have ever even played football, they've clearly been set up for failure. So, can the squad, led by its terrified and unathletic designated quarterback, Wyatt, figure out how to leverage the various basketball, gymnastics, ballet, arm wrestling, and other skills it does have in time to save the world? Losing 72-6 to the hulking alien Droglidorians in the first game doesn’t inspire confidence; still, throwing out the standard playbook turns out to be a good first step. And, as outrageously brutal, toothy, toxic slime–spitting opponents come and go, the team jells together in time to face the Yextals—the biggest, meanest, most carnivorous foe of all—in the finals. Wyatt turns out to have such an unexpected knack for leadership and, in the crunch, clever improvisational skills that he comes away with a new, well-earned sense of self-confidence. In his narrative and Dorman’s free-wheeling, all-action scenes, the Defenders appear as a notably diverse bunch, both multiracial and, as it includes several immigrants from other planets, multispecies. The large font, ample white space, fast pace, and abundant illustrations will attract reluctant readers.
Gridiron heroics in space, with spotlights on the personal and collective value of team play. (Science fiction. 8-11)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780593662304
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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