Inventive, humorous, and delightful.
New York City’s Rehearsal Club is the setting for a tale spanning 70 years.
In the present day, 12-year-old white-presenting Paloma Gallagher is new to the city, moving with her librarian parents from Arizona to be near her half sister, Naomi, an aspiring actor and resident of the boardinghouse. Pal is an impulsive jokester, often shy in new situations and longing for a tighter relationship with 19-year-old Naomi. Her voice volleys between bravado and fear as she has grand ideas with often disastrous outcomes. Along the way she finds a quirky and diverse set of friends and co-conspirators and develops some insights into her own feelings. Amid the third-person narration focusing on Pal, readers will find strategic and informative chapters narrated by Olive, a resident of the club in 1954, whose roommate Posy’s larger-than-life personality becomes the focal point of the drama in both eras (both women are white). When Pal finds intriguing hidden material connected to Posy, it leads her and her friends to follow clues to solve mysteries within mysteries with twists and turns galore—and even confront a threat to the club itself. Readers who pay close attention to small details will enjoy the reveals. Theatrical New York City appears as an important character in the work; the authors’ descriptions of its sights, sounds, and people add much to the tale. Readers will cheer for Pal and sigh with relief at the satisfying outcomes.
Inventive, humorous, and delightful. (authors’ note) (Mystery. 9-13)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9781773069913
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Groundwood
Review Posted Online: today
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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