This isn’t the absolute freshest fantasy for this age group, but the prince’s boldly impossible plan will carry readers...
Two standard character types—a spunky lower-class girl and a prince without a kingdom—reluctantly bond in a series opener that features colorful aspects mortared together with tired tropes.
Snail is a midwife’s apprentice in the Unseelie Court, which occupies a harsh, chaotic castle brimming with many kinds of fey. Snail’s midwifery role is strictly prescribed, but she’s clumsy and tends to stumble into trouble. Elsewhere in the castle lives Prince Aspen, called the Hostage Prince since he doesn’t belong to the royal Unseelie family—he belongs to their enemies. By birth, he’s the third successor to the faraway Seelie throne. Seven years ago, each court sent a son to their enemy’s home as a hostage against the possibility of war. When a drow’s lie and a queen’s hostility send Snail and Aspen tumbling into a frantic escape from execution, they grudgingly work together to cross changing landscapes and reach his Seelie family—which doesn’t offer the safety they expect. A comical troll birthing scene, an ending twist and an intriguing riddle that Aspen’s charged to carry balance out the uneven creativity and the fact that Snail’s plucky impudence—a central aspect of her characterization—receives only the thinnest justification.
This isn’t the absolute freshest fantasy for this age group, but the prince’s boldly impossible plan will carry readers forward to the next installment. (Fantasy. 8-11)Pub Date: June 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-670-01434-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dizzyingly silly.
The famous superhero returns to fight another villain with all the trademark wit and humor the series is known for.
Despite the title, Captain Underpants is bizarrely absent from most of this adventure. His school-age companions, George and Harold, maintain most of the spotlight. The creative chums fool around with time travel and several wacky inventions before coming upon the evil Turbo Toilet 2000, making its return for vengeance after sitting out a few of the previous books. When the good Captain shows up to save the day, he brings with him dynamic action and wordplay that meet the series’ standards. The Captain Underpants saga maintains its charm even into this, the 11th volume. The epic is filled to the brim with sight gags, toilet humor, flip-o-ramas and anarchic glee. Holding all this nonsense together is the author’s good-natured sense of harmless fun. The humor is never gross or over-the-top, just loud and innocuous. Adults may roll their eyes here and there, but youngsters will eat this up just as quickly as they devoured every other Underpants episode.
Dizzyingly silly. (Humor. 8-10)Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-545-50490-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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
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