Little is answered definitively, but fans won’t mind; they’ll just be pleased there are two more young Snicket adventures to...
Questions answered, question posed (the wrong one again). Mysteries solved, mystery deepens….
Nearly 13-year-old Lemony Snicket chased the missing statue of the Bombinating Beast under the inept, ignorant and annoying supervision of his mentor S. Theodora Merkson (“Who Could That Be at This Hour?”, 2012). That case didn’t turn out too well. They now have a new case, and Theodora looks to be pursuing this as ineptly as she did before. The duo is searching for Miss Cleo Knight, daughter of the heirs of Ink Inc. Her unconcerned parents appear to have been drugged by their private apothecary, Dr. Flammarion, but housekeepers Zara and Zora are deeply worried. Cleo’s a brilliant chemist, but shallow investigation points to her having run off to join the circus. Young Mr. Snicket knows most things are not as they seem at first, and while his mentor celebrates solving the case, he investigates further, with the help of associates from his last adventure, and discovers connections to their last case…and the case his sister Kit is working on. Snicket’s second of four All the Wrong Questions is more sly noir for preteens. Chock-full of linguistic play and literary allusions to children’s and classic literature, this is adventure mystery for young readers who like to think as they read.
Little is answered definitively, but fans won’t mind; they’ll just be pleased there are two more young Snicket adventures to come. (Mystery. 8-14)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-12305-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2013
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
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The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
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