Tanglewood, a town only vaguely depicted and not particularly evocative of Maine, may have been destroyed by eerie mushrooms...
Creeping, invasive, blue-glowing mushrooms threaten to destroy a Maine town unless the intrepid hero, eighth-grader Eric, can fend them off.
Tanglewood, a town only vaguely depicted and not particularly evocative of Maine, may have been destroyed by eerie mushrooms once before, in the Colonial period—at least if the writings of a now-dead sci-fi author can be believed. With his parents’ marriage on shaky ground and his clever 9-year-old brother Brian providing lots of challenges, Eric is headed for trouble. It comes first in a teasing incident with his fellow football-team members that gets out of hand, then when he aids a girl, Mandy, who has run away from the private girls’ reform school his mother oversees, making it inevitable that he’ll run afoul of the police. Meanwhile, the mushrooms keep spreading, invading and undermining homes, streets and the local school, a looming threat adults seem oblivious to—perhaps because they caught a glimpse of the book’s disappointing, almost silly cover art. Eric’s banter with friends and his younger brother, his inner dialogue as he analyzes his own behavior and his relationship with his parents all ring nicely true, but with the focus more on his interactions, the potential scariness of the evil mushrooms is never fully realized.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-375-86758-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
A satisfying story of family, friendship and small-town cooperation in a 21st-century world.
Sent to stay with octogenarian relatives for the summer, 14-year-old Mike ends up coordinating a community drive to raise $40,000 for the adoption of a Romanian orphan. He’ll never be his dad's kind of engineer, but he learns he’s great at human engineering.
Mike’s math learning disability is matched by his widower father's lack of social competence; the Giant Genius can’t even reliably remember his son’s name. Like many of the folks the boy comes to know in Do Over, Penn.—his great-uncle Poppy silent in his chair, the multiply pierced-and-tattooed Gladys from the bank and “a homeless guy” who calls himself Past—Mike feels like a failure. But in spite of his own lack of confidence, he provides the kick start they need to cope with their losses and contribute to the campaign. Using the Internet (especially YouTube), Mike makes use of town talents and his own webpage design skills and entrepreneurial imagination. Math-definition chapter headings (Compatible Numbers, Zero Property, Tessellations) turn out to apply well to human actions in this well-paced, first-person narrative. Erskine described Asperger’s syndrome from the inside in Mockingbird (2010). Here, it’s a likely cause for the rift between father and son touchingly mended at the novel's cinematic conclusion.
A satisfying story of family, friendship and small-town cooperation in a 21st-century world. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: June 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-25505-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
A trilogy opener both rich and strange, if heavy at the front end.
Riggs spins a gothic tale of strangely gifted children and the monsters that pursue them from a set of eerie, old trick photographs.
The brutal murder of his grandfather and a glimpse of a man with a mouth full of tentacles prompts months of nightmares and psychotherapy for 15-year-old Jacob, followed by a visit to a remote Welsh island where, his grandfather had always claimed, there lived children who could fly, lift boulders and display like weird abilities. The stories turn out to be true—but Jacob discovers that he has unwittingly exposed the sheltered “peculiar spirits” (of which he turns out to be one) and their werefalcon protector to a murderous hollowgast and its shape-changing servant wight. The interspersed photographs—gathered at flea markets and from collectors—nearly all seem to have been created in the late 19th or early 20th centuries and generally feature stone-faced figures, mostly children, in inscrutable costumes and situations. They are seen floating in the air, posing with a disreputable-looking Santa, covered in bees, dressed in rags and kneeling on a bomb, among other surreal images. Though Jacob’s overdeveloped back story gives the tale a slow start, the pictures add an eldritch element from the early going, and along with creepy bad guys, the author tucks in suspenseful chases and splashes of gore as he goes. He also whirls a major storm, flying bullets and a time loop into a wild climax that leaves Jacob poised for the sequel.
A trilogy opener both rich and strange, if heavy at the front end. (Horror/fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59474-476-1
Page Count: 234
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2014
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