A shipshape but easygoing romp that offers youngsters the comical wish fulfillment of being let loose on a starship.
In this middle-grade-SF sequel, Eudora Jenkins, a spacegoing third-grader, schemes to free a group of live lobsters before it’s served as part of a starship banquet—with unexpected results.
Horn offers the second entry in his series, following Eudora Space Kid: The Great Engine Room Takeover(2021). Eudora is an elementary-school-age girl in the year 4021, whose mother serves aboard a giant “astroliner” called the Athena. It’s populated by a diverse, multispecies crew who hail from all over the 20-world Planetary Republic. The security chief, Lt. Londo, is a leonine alien called a Qlaxon, whose fearsome warrior society is traditionally the antagonist of the Republic, but he’s a pleasant guy; Eudora’s adoptive father, Max, is a part-cephalopod scientist. The young girl manages to get into trouble routinely on the ship, much to the consternation of long-suffering Captain Jax and his no-nonsense Number Two, Stella Ying. Eudora’s misadventures this time around center on the girl’s realization that a shipboard colony of 30 live lobsters, which are objects of intense study by Max, are currently in demand as food at the great ship’s annual New Year’s Dinner Buffet. Eudora is properly horrified at this possibility, and with her friend Arnold, Londo’s human stepson, she conspires to raid her father’s lab and abduct the endangered crustaceans. But what is her next step to guarantee that the lobsters do not end up as seafood? It turns out that Eudora has not quite thought that far ahead, and she hasn’t quite worked out all the details of her plan.
This series’ fictional world obviously has a very strong Star Trek influence, although its tone is one of juvenile-level whimsy. The massive Athena is a clear stand-in for the USS Enterprise and the catlike Qlaxon seem to be generally modeled after the cherished Starfleet frenemies, the Klingons (although the Trek universe has a feline-esque species of aliens, too, known as the Caitians). In addition, the children even carry around very helpful tricorders by another name. Eudora is shown to have clear STEM ambitions in her goal to be the ship’s chief engineer someday, although that aspect of her character is shown to be somewhat less vital to the plot over the course of this installment. The narrative has no violence to speak of and the work’s central plea for animal rights (at least when it comes to lobsters) is generally conveyed with a very light touch. The work is also accessorized with grayscale illustrations by Hoover, which have a style that’s mildly reminiscent of anime. In general, this is an upbeat work that makes a fine chapter-book diversion for young readers, who may possibly use this series as a springboard to some of the juvenile-skewing titles by such SF authors as Robert A. Heinlein; for example, if one likes Eudora’s SF adventures, one may later love Heinlein’s 1963 novel Podkayne of Mars, which features the adventures of 15-year-old girl on a spaceliner.
A shipshape but easygoing romp that offers youngsters the comical wish fulfillment of being let loose on a starship.Pub Date: March 21, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-73667-742-1
Page Count: 88
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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