An obvious—and bland—riff on the Magic Treehouse series.
An odd item found in a flea-market suitcase sends two children back to days of yore in this series opener aimed at fledgling chapter-book readers.
The suitcase, plainly a MacGuffin, contains a number of seemingly random objects and a remote-control thingy—and as soon as bookish Chase picks up what he thinks is a doorknob with a dragon’s head, he and his camera-toting little sister, Ava, find themselves in a medieval slops closet overhearing a conversation between two knights about a plot against King Arthur. The “doorknob,” it turns out, is actually the hilt of Excalibur, and only finding some way to magically repair the sword can save the king from an assassin’s attack. Writing in present tense, Mass moves the plot along smartly to a climax featuring some brisk, if bloodless, swordplay (her Arthur is more into disarming his opponents than carving them up), then has Ava push a button on the remote to send the young siblings back home. The “time jumpers” billing is deceptive as, though Chase frets about changing the future, neither the narrative nor Vidal’s frequent grayscale illustrations make much effort to place the episode in a true historical setting. The author tucks in a fart joke early on but never follows it up and, in a clumsy effort to inject a bit of suspense, trots in a mysterious, surly villain with differently colored eyes who is after the suitcase. Characters are default white.
An obvious—and bland—riff on the Magic Treehouse series. (review questions) (Fantasy. 6-9)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-338-21737-7
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Branches/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A brisk if bland offering for series fans, but cleverer metafictive romps abound.
The titular cookie runs off the page at a bookstore storytime, pursued by young listeners and literary characters.
Following on 13 previous How To Catch… escapades, Wallace supplies sometimes-tortured doggerel and Elkerton, a set of helter-skelter cartoon scenes. Here the insouciant narrator scampers through aisles, avoiding a series of elaborate snares set by the racially diverse young storytime audience with help from some classic figures: “Alice and her mad-hat friends, / as a gift for my unbirthday, / helped guide me through the walls of shelves— / now I’m bound to find my way.” The literary helpers don’t look like their conventional or Disney counterparts in the illustrations, but all are clearly identified by at least a broad hint or visual cue, like the unnamed “wizard” who swoops in on a broom to knock over a tower labeled “Frogwarts.” Along with playing a bit fast and loose with details (“Perhaps the boy with the magic beans / saved me with his cow…”) the author discards his original’s lip-smacking climax to have the errant snack circling back at last to his book for a comfier sort of happily-ever-after.
A brisk if bland offering for series fans, but cleverer metafictive romps abound. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7282-0935-7
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Sourcebooks Wonderland
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A close encounter of the best kind.
Left behind when the space bus departs, a child discovers that the moon isn’t as lifeless as it looks.
While the rest of the space-suited class follows the teacher like ducklings, one laggard carrying crayons and a sketchbook sits down to draw our home planet floating overhead, falls asleep, and wakes to see the bus zooming off. The bright yellow bus, the gaggle of playful field-trippers, and even the dull gray boulders strewn over the equally dull gray lunar surface have a rounded solidity suggestive of Plasticine models in Hare’s wordless but cinematic scenes…as do the rubbery, one-eyed, dull gray creatures (think: those stress-busting dolls with ears that pop out when squeezed) that emerge from the regolith. The mutual shock lasts but a moment before the lunarians eagerly grab the proffered crayons to brighten the bland gray setting with silly designs. The creatures dive into the dust when the bus swoops back down but pop up to exchange goodbye waves with the errant child, who turns out to be an olive-skinned kid with a mop of brown hair last seen drawing one of their new friends with the one crayon—gray, of course—left in the box. Body language is expressive enough in this debut outing to make a verbal narrative superfluous.
A close encounter of the best kind. (Picture book. 6-8)Pub Date: May 14, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4253-9
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Margaret Ferguson/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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