“Well, we got no choice, an’ that’s a fact. The Rade has showed up, years before we ever done expected them, and yer about ten years shy o’ half-cooked, but we got no choice. There ain’t no time ta go looking for another champion. I guess ya’ll hafta do.” Thus is 11-year-old Ethan Feld, the worst ballplayer in the history of the game, drafted by the Home Run King of three worlds to forestall the end of the world at Ragged Rock. Ragged Rock is not a place but a moment—the last out of the bottom of the ninth—and the Rade is the combined hordes of Coyote, the Changer, who is bent on poisoning the four great branches of the World Tree. After the death of his mother, however, Ethan hasn’t much faith in his ability to be anybody’s hero, but when his Zeppelin-designer father is kidnapped by Coyote to engineer Ragged Rock, he takes up a baseball-bat-sized chunk of the World Tree and joins the cause. Plaiting together elements from Scandinavian and Native American mythology, American legend, and world literature, Pulitzer-winner Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, 2000, etc.), writing for young people for the first time, constructs a uniquely American fantasy peopled by were-animals, sasquatches, giants, and ferishers—fairies who look like nothing so much as 18-inch-high storybook Indians—and fueled by a healthy reverence for the Great American Game. As catcher and slugger for Big Chief Cinquefoil’s Traveling Shadowtails All-Star Baseball Club, Ethan is joined by Clam Island teammates Jennifer T. Rideout and Thor Wignutt, and an assortment of otherworldly supporters. Together they barnstorm across the Summerlands until, at Diamond Green, they meet Coyote and his team of Hobbledehoys, for one last, great game. The sprawling, vigorous narrative pulls out all the stops, gleefully reveling in the wonders it produces at every turn, from the magically ever-sunny corner of drizzly Clam Island to the varied denizens of the Summerlands. This raucous, exhilarating, joyful, and, above all, fun offering displays an enormous respect for the tradition of great fantasies that come before it, from Irving, Baum, and Nesbit, to Lewis, Tolkien, and Pullman, while confidently taking its place beside them. (Fiction. 10+)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7868-0877-2
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An epic fantasy with timeless themes and unforgettable characters.
Two young people save the world and all the magic in it in this series opener.
When tall, dark-haired, white-skinned Christopher Forrester goes to stay with his grandfather in Scotland, he ventures to the top of a forbidden hill and discovers astonishing magical creatures. His grandfather explains that Christopher’s family are guardians of the “way through” to the Archipelago, where the Glimourie Tree grows—the source of glimourie, or the world’s magic. Black-haired, olive-skinned Mal Arvorian, a girl from the Archipelago, is being pursued by a murderer, and she asks Christopher for help, launching them both on a wild, dangerous journey to discover why the glimourie is disappearing and how to stop it. Together with a part-nereid woman, a ratatoska, a dragon, and a Berserker, they face an odyssey of dangerous tasks to find the Immortal, the only one who can reverse the draining of magic. Like Lyra and Will from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, Mal and Christopher sacrifice their innocence for experience, meeting every challenge with depthless courage until they finally reach the maze at the heart of it all. Rundell throws myriad obstacles in her characters’ way, but she gives them tools both tangible (a casapasaran, which always points the way home, and the glamry blade, which cuts through anything) and intangible (the desire “to protect something worth protecting” and an “insistence that the world is worth loving”). Final art not seen.
An epic fantasy with timeless themes and unforgettable characters. (map, bestiary) (Fantasy. 10-16)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593809860
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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