Using multiple narrators and expertly concocted cliffhangers, Pullman (The Subtle Knife, 1997, etc.) crafts a thrilling page-turner less violent than his Sally Lockhart adventures but no less breathlessly paced. Brought to these shores 16 years after it was first published in Britain, this gothic farce features young orphans, evil schemers, a gloomy Swiss castle, a long-lost heir, stalwart lads, capable women, a con man on the lam, hilariously bumbling police officers, and Zamiel: the Prince of the Mountains, the Demon Huntsman, “swathed in impenetrable darkness, with eyes of raging fire.” Having agreed to supply the demon with human prey in exchange for riches, the amoral upstart Count Karlstein and his slimy secretary Snivelwurst plan to lock bereaved young Lucy and Charlotte, believed to be the last Karlsteins in the direct line, in a hunting lodge on All Souls’ Eve. Fortunately, 14-year-old servant Hildi and chunky but superbly competent English tutor Augusta Davenport get wind of the plot and engineer a clever reversal, but not before a sequence of mishaps, desperate searches, captures, and escapes, complicated by a tangle of subplots and capped by a gloriously frightening glimpse of Zamiel himself, at whose hands Count Karlstein meets a well-deserved doom. In the ensuing hubbub, doughty Miss Davenport is reunited with her lost love Antonio Rolipolio, an escape artist whose feckless assistant Max turns out to be none other than Castle Karlstein’s real heir, kidnapped as a baby and thought lost. It’s whirlwind plotting, manipulated into a pulsing tale of darkened hearts, treachery, and at long last, redemption. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: July 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-89255-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1998
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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