A tale to sweep new and confirmed fans into the author’s distinctively imagined blend of history, magic, mythology,...
In this prequel to Milford’s Nagspeake tales, a privateer’s daughter takes on a ruthless time traveler who kidnaps her little brother.
Having been raised at sea aboard the Left-Handed Fate, 12-year-old Lucy is feeling marooned in the house her father, Capt. Bluecrowne, has built above the otherworldly town of Nagspeake for her, her half brother, Liao, and her beloved stepmother, Xiaoming. But hardly have the three moved in than Liao—already displaying a prodigious talent for constructing bombs and magical fireworks—is spirited away by Foulk Trigemine, a cold-eyed “roamer” sent to gather the boy up as a “conflagrationeer” for a man reputed to own some of Hell’s own coal. Foolishly, rather than use his kairos mechanism to return whence he came, Trigemine lingers in the town and era, scheming to snatch up other treasures. Unfortunately (for him), not only is Lucy willing to, literally, walk through fire to rescue her brother, but the lad’s vengeful mother turns out to be much more than she appears. Milford tucks strange places, odd artifacts, and people with mysterious pasts into a suspenseful tale properly supplied with sinister villains, clever twists, large explosions, and heartbreaking sacrifices. Along with the interracial family at the story’s center (Lucy and her father are white, while Liao and his mother are Chinese), black and Asian supporting characters add notes of diversity to the cast. Finished illustrations not seen.
A tale to sweep new and confirmed fans into the author’s distinctively imagined blend of history, magic, mythology, chemistry, and nautical lore. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-46688-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
