A pretty story tenderly told and fabulously illustrated. A minstrel sings of a unicorn in a great hall, while nobles vie with one another as to which one will capture the creature. Tanisa the serving girl sees that Chris, the duke’s son, is as bloodthirsty as the rest. She attends the hunt the next day to serve at luncheon and wakes to find the white unicorn with its head in her lap. Chris stumbles upon them and draws his bow, but his arrow wounds Tanisa. The unicorn heals her and then him, changing his heart so that he promises to make the land safe for the unicorn. Tanisa and the unicorn flee until folk “have earned the right to have unicorns among us.” While the clarity of the story line occasionally falters, the pictures are simply magical. Using drawings overlaid with paint and photographs, Spalenka’s images often look like Renaissance portraits or still lifes, then like pellucid landscapes or dreamscapes. Each full-page, full-bleed illustration, with text floated over it, contains a fully realized and imagined space: The unicorn is a full-blooded creature with bones and sinew. Satisfyingly gorgeous. (Picture book. 7-12)
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8234-1728-5
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
Facing sneering peers, plus a cave full of vicious young dragons and two mountainous, malign adult ones, brings an ordinary Viking lad around to becoming a “Hero the Hard Way” in this farcical import. Dispatched to capture and train some breed of dragon as a rite of passage into the Hairy Hooligan Tribe, unprepossessing Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III returns not with a mighty Gronkle, or an aptly named Monstrous Nightmare, but a shrimpy creature laughingly dubbed “Toothless”—who also turns out to be about as trainable as a cat, with an attitude to match. But Hiccup and Toothless develop into a doughty team when two humongous, fire-breathing Sea Dragons pull up to shore, looking for the odd village or army to devour. Cowell adds lots of jagged, William Steig–like sketches to a narrative rich in dragon muck, cartoon violence, and characters with names like Snotlout and Dogsbreath the Duhbrain. Her genuinely fierce, intelligent, and scary dragons nearly steal the show, but Hiccup and his diminutive sidekick ultimately come out on top, both displaying a proper hero’s mix of quick wit, courage, and loyalty. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: May 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-316-73737-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
An unsubtle and unengaging attempt to educate children on border issues.
Uchenna and Elliot join Professor Fauna on a trip to the southern border to rescue the mythical chupacabras.
In this borderland adventure of the Unicorn Rescue Society, Peruvian Professor Fauna whisks Uchenna and the ever reluctant Elliot out of class and flies them down on a dilapidated plane to Laredo, Texas. The trio’s mission is to rescue a baby chupacabra, whose pack’s feeding pattern has been disrupted by a border wall. In this fourth installment of the series, Gidwitz seeks to provide credibility and authority on border topics by bringing on Mexican-American author Bowles as a co-writer. However, their effort to incorporate complex topics—such as environmental and immigration issues—into an otherwise formulaic and predictable plot falls short, as the complexities of border life are constantly pointed out and explained by adults. As in previous installments, one of Professor Fauna’s ex-colleagues makes an appearance to aid the group in thwarting whatever species-endangering scheme the Schmoke brothers may have concocted. The encounter between Dr. Cervantes, a Mexican-American professor teaching at Texas A&M, and her former mentor creates tension between the adult characters, forcing the children to become spectators who simply learn and imitate the correct behaviors from adults. Uchenna presents black and Elliot, white.
An unsubtle and unengaging attempt to educate children on border issues. (Fantasy. 7-12)Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-7352-3179-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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