Under the hot Egyptian sun, ancient shipwrights chopped, pounded and strained. The death of the pharaoh Cheops required two magnificent ships be built to guide him across the eternal “winding waterway” of sky. More than 4,000 years later, in 1954, an Egyptologist makes an astonishing discovery. Peering through a tiny excavation hole, he glimpses a fragment of wood—one of the pharaoh’s boats. Expert restoration specialist Ahmed Youssef Moustafa is given the task of reconstructing the boat, all 1,224 pieces. Weitzman, no stranger to transportation design (A Subway for New York, 2005, etc.), gracefully merges past and present as he describes the intricate steps of how the boat was first built—and rebuilt, so many thousands of years later. The flat illustrations in warm earth tones mirror ancient Egyptian reliefs; each panel shows stages of construction and tools in action. The author carefully labels every part, allowing readers to follow along as the boat is pieced together. Culminating in an expansive gatefold, the pharaoh’s boat stretches wide. Both ship and story are a mastery of precise craftsmanship. (acknowledgements, afterword, map) (Nonfiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: May 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-547-05341-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
The whimsy is slight—the story is not—and both its interest and its vocabulary are for the youngest members of this age...
Beverly Cleary has written all kinds of books (the most successful ones about the irrepressible Henry Huggins) but this is her first fantasy.
Actually it's plain clothes fantasy grounded in the everyday—except for the original conceit of a mouse who can talk and ride a motorcycle. A toy motorcycle, which belongs to Keith, a youngster, who comes to the hotel where Ralph lives with his family; Ralph and Keith become friends, Keith gives him a peanut butter sandwich, but finally Ralph loses the motorcycle—it goes out with the dirty linen. Both feel dreadfully; it was their favorite toy; but after Keith gets sick, and Ralph manages to find an aspirin for him in a nearby room, and the motorcycle is returned, it is left with Ralph....
The whimsy is slight—the story is not—and both its interest and its vocabulary are for the youngest members of this age group. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 22, 1965
ISBN: 0380709244
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1965
BOOK TO SCREEN
All aboooooard!
Mbalia takes the legacy of Pullman porters as inspiration for his latest fantasy world rooted in Black lore and traditions in this series opener.
Twelve-year-old Jax Freeman is an unwilling transplant to Chicago, sent away from his Raleigh, North Carolina, home by his parents after an incident lands him in the juvenile justice system. Just about as soon as he descends from the train, the weirdness starts: Inanimate objects speak to him, a strange old woman tells him his ancestors need him, and a terrifying creature tries to steal his skin. The strangeness keeps building, from the inspirational signs at his grandmother’s house that keep changing their messages to the class in…magic?…at DuSable Middle School. And what’s with the peculiar reactions he gets whenever people learn his surname? Pretty soon Jax is riding a magic train called the Shriek, charged with a mission to heal a feud among the five magical summoning families of Chicago—a mission that killed his great-great-grandfather. Jax spends most of the novel in a state of frustration as he tries to understand this new world, and readers may sympathize as they wait with him for other characters to dole out information. Mbalia has so much fun developing the world’s rules and inhabitants, though, that readers will probably not mind the adventure’s bagginess. Jax has a digressive narrative style that runs to broad comedy, but it’s his fundamental decency that really shines.
All aboooooard! (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781368064736
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Freedom Fire/Disney
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
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