Grim and plausible.
Inspired by his favorite fictional detective, 12-year-old Ansel investigates when his journalist father disappears just before a scheduled visit from Nazi kingpin Heinrich Himmler.
People commonly believe that “it can’t happen here,” Spradlin writes meaningfully, as he did in his series opener (which centered on Ansel’s friend Rolf). “It can.” As the novel opens, a rock painted with the word “Judenliebhaber” (“Jew lover”) is thrown through Ansel’s window—just a hint of what’s to come. Ansel’s Bavarian town is gripped by rising tides of fear and excitement as the coming of Hitler’s lieutenant brings a flood of Nazi recruits and propaganda about lying journalists. When his defiantly anti-Nazi father drops out of sight, the bookish lad takes cues from the exploits of teen detective Dirk Goodly to seek out his whereabouts. Has he been kidnapped? Or worse? With help from Rolf and other allies, Ansel fearlessly antagonizes creepy, spiderlike Hans, too, even though the Hitler Youth leader has paramilitary brownshirt thugs at his back now and is certain to retaliate. Things seem hopeless, though along with perceptive efforts to explain how ordinary citizens could come to condone monsters, the author does try to lighten the load with banter and Ansel’s frequent “Unassailable Facts of Life,” such as “#33: When the wise man flees, he leaves his pants behind.” Still, readers conscious of current events will have no trouble catching the episode’s ominous topicality.
Grim and plausible. (timeline, glossary) (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: June 24, 2025
ISBN: 9781665947237
Page Count: 176
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2025
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
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