Mildly amusing, with a silly, stomach-turning premise conveying sober concepts.
When a bizarre ritual goes haywire, Kids Say the Darndest Things meets Lord of the Flies.
In St. Polonius-on-the-Fjord, citizens over 12 partake in the annual commemoration of the town’s founding by eating of the Sacred Bear Liver. They engage in this loathsome rite to avoid falling into a monthslong slumber, a fate suffered by the original settlers. This year, white Jean Huddy participates for the first time but secretly barfs up her portion. Then, against all odds, everyone over 12 who did sample the liver falls fast asleep, leaving only the town’s children—including Jean and Isara, a 13-year-old boy of Thai heritage—awake and obligated to assume their parents’ jobs. The author mines a few laughs from kids’ performing adult work, but some aspects are sinister: the mayor’s xenophobic son revels in his tyranny; the town bullies are strict law enforcers. An unconvincing mystery subplot involves a startling revelation about what happened to the grown-ups, the discovery of a secret formula to reverse the sleep, and Jean’s and her friends’ frantic scramble to interpret and use it to awaken the sleepers. Themes abound in this political satire, with its “Sleeping Beauty” and Shakespearean overtones, including clueless adults, governmental corruption, shady corporate dealings, usurpation of power, anti-immigration sentiments, unethical science, and animal cruelty. Savvy readers may glean some hints about the current charged political scene. These disparate storylines coalesce uneasily.
Mildly amusing, with a silly, stomach-turning premise conveying sober concepts. (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5247-1785-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Wendy Lamb/Random
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
On equal footing with a garden-variety potato.
The new kid in school endures becoming the school mascot.
Ben Hardy has never cared for potatoes, and this distaste has become a barrier to adjusting to life in his new Idaho town. His school’s mascot is the Spud, and after a series of misfortunes, Ben is enlisted to don the potato costume and cheer on his school’s team. Ben balances his duties as a life-sized potato against his desperate desire to hide the fact that he’s the dork in the suit. After all, his cute new crush, Jayla, wouldn’t be too impressed to discover Ben’s secret. The ensuing novel is a fairly boilerplate middle–grade narrative: snarky tween protagonist, the crush that isn’t quite what she seems, and a pair of best friends that have more going on than our hero initially believes. The author keeps the novel moving quickly, pushing forward with witty asides and narrative momentum so fast that readers won’t really mind that the plot’s spine is one they’ve encountered many times before. Once finished, readers will feel little resonance and move on to the next book in their to-read piles, but in the moment the novel is pleasant enough. Ben, Jayla, and Ben’s friend Hunter are white while Ellie, Ben’s other good pal, is Latina.
On equal footing with a garden-variety potato. (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-11866-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A didactic blueprint disguised as a supernatural treasure map.
A girl who delights in the macabre harnesses her inherited supernatural ability.
It’s not just her stark white hair that makes 11-year-old Zee Puckett stand out in nowheresville Knobb’s Ferry. She’s a storyteller, a Mary Shelley fangirl, and is being raised by her 21-year-old high school dropout sister while their father looks for work upstate (cue the wayward glances from the affluent demography). Don’t pity her, because Zee doesn’t acquiesce to snobbery, bullying, or pretty much anything that confronts her. But a dog with bleeding eyes in a cemetery gives her pause—momentarily—because the beast is just the tip of the wicked that has this way come to town. Time to get some help from ghosts. The creepy supernatural current continues throughout, intermingled with very real forays into bullying (Zee won’t stand for it or for the notion that good girls need to act nice), body positivity, socio-economic status and social hierarchy, and mental health. This debut from a promising writer involves a navigation of caste systems, self-esteem, and villainy that exists in an interesting world with intriguing characters, but they receive a flat, two-dimensional treatment that ultimately makes the book feel like one is learning a ho-hum lesson in morality. Zee is presumably White (as is her rich-girl nemesis–cum-comrade, Nellie). Her best friend, Elijah, is cued as Black. Warning: this just might spur frenzied requests for Frankenstein.
A didactic blueprint disguised as a supernatural treasure map. (Supernatural. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 10, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-304460-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
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