A beautifully written fantasy allegory with comic grace notes
An orphan girl during the Dust Bowl steals an elephant, some magical seeds, and a cantankerous old man’s heart.
Nitty’s starving since she’s run away from Grimsgate Orphanage, where she’s spent all of her 10 years, but she’ll take hunger outside over abuse inside any day. She’s no thief, but when she sees the gorgeous, glowing, green seeds for sale on the tinker’s wagon, she can’t resist swiping the bag. She flees town in a dust storm, taking refuge with the “Great Magnolious,” an abused circus elephant scheduled to be hanged in a “spectacle never to be forgotten.” The pair finds shelter in cranky Windle’s barn, quickly warming his heart. Despite friendship (Windle is joined in Nitty’s found family by Twitch, a boy with dust pneumonia), all is not well in tiny, poverty-stricken Fortune’s Bluff. The townspeople are deeply in debt to “dastardly” Mayor Snollygost for food and medicines, and it’s funny how the dust storms seem to strike whenever the mayor is angry at someone. Will the magical crop from Nitty’s little cache of stolen seeds help them save the day? Nitty loves words, and Nelson’s prose rises to the occasion, spooling out gorgeous sentences. Twitch has brown skin while almost everyone else is either undescribed or clearly white, but even the villains in this 1930s American town seem inexplicably oblivious to race.
A beautifully written fantasy allegory with comic grace notes . (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: June 18, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-9848-3174-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A waggish tale with a serious (and timely) theme.
An age-old rivalry is reluctantly put aside when two young vacationers are lost in the wilderness.
Anthropomorphic—in body if definitely not behavior—Dogg Scout Oscar and pampered Molly Hissleton stray from their separate camps, meet by chance in a trackless magic forest, and almost immediately recognize that their only chance of survival, distasteful as the notion may be, lies in calling a truce. Patterson and Grabenstein really work the notion here that cooperation is better than prejudice founded on ignorance and habit, interspersing explicit exchanges on the topic while casting the squabbling pair with complementary abilities that come out as they face challenges ranging from finding food to escaping such predators as a mountain lion and a pack of vicious “weaselboars.” By the time they cross a wide river (on a raft steered by “Old Jim,” an otter whose homespun utterances are generally cribbed from Mark Twain—an uneasy reference) back to civilization, the two are BFFs. But can that friendship survive the return, with all the social and familial pressures to resume the old enmity? A climactic cage-match–style confrontation before a worked-up multispecies audience provides the answer. In the illustrations (not seen in finished form) López plops wide-eyed animal heads atop clothed, more or less human forms and adds dialogue balloons for punchlines.
A waggish tale with a serious (and timely) theme. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-41156-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
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