A glorious cacophony of wildly inventive gadgets, gags, and action.
After her father’s abduction, a middle school genius is sent to a school filled with quirks and quarks.
Thirteen-year-old Nikola, a scientific prodigy who presents white but is of ambiguous race, is the ostracized weirdo at her North Dakota school. On the day she encounters Tabbabitha, the ugliest, oddest-looking girl she’s ever seen, Nikola’s scientist father is abducted and Nikola barely escapes Tabbabitha’s goons herself. For her protection, Nikola’s father had arranged that she be sent to the Plaskington International Laboratory School of Scientific Research and Technological Advancement (“the School” for short), a highly secure, town-sized campus where a small percentage of racially diverse, gifted humans join parahumans in the study of ludicrously advanced science. Extraterrestrial parahumans have all sorts of wild appearances and abilities, and they are very distant cousins to the evil, interdimensional, Lovecraft-ian horrors called Old Ones—of whom Tabbabitha is one. Nikola’s bullying-vs.-friendship storyline plays out with nuance. Although her bullies back home are clearly portrayed as in the wrong, Nikola’s pre-emptive rejection of others doesn’t help; here she decides to turn over a new leaf among other geniuses only to struggle with parahuman social norms. This is juxtaposed against absolute outlandishness, an endless parade of jokes (both sly and knee-slapping), incredibly wacky worldbuilding and characters, and a savvy, refreshing irreverence for the genre. Readers will clamor for more.
A glorious cacophony of wildly inventive gadgets, gags, and action. (Science fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-3845-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
A half-baked jumble of poorly connected themes, incidents, and tropes.
Eleven-year-old Georgie sets out to the rescue after seeing his dad snatched into thin air by a hideous figure.
In a confusing debut that reads like a first draft, the kidnapping impels the young slingshot expert to go from doggedly enduring vicious bullying at school to intrepidly plunging after his father through a portal to Scatterplot, an otherworldly realm where the memories of everyone in New York are uploaded by omnilingual Scribes. Classmates Apurva Aluwhalia (who’s cued South Asian) and Roscoe Harris (who reads Black and is confined to a role that’s largely limited to comic relief), each motivated by their own concerns, follow white-presenting Georgie on his adventure. In Scatterplot, they must remain alert for the “tribe” of “bad people” called Altercockers, formed by the exiled Rollie D. Meanwhile, Flint Eldritch, the menacing figure who was responsible for Georgie’s father’s disappearance, is bent on using the Aetherquill, a magical pen that can rewrite reality in unpredictable ways, to replace all those recorded memories with fake ones. In a story that’s marred by stilted dialogue, flat characterization, and awkward turns of phrase, Georgie and his friends, along with Scatterplot siblings Edie and Ore, embark on a quest to save both his father and the entire realm. The puss-oozing, misshapen villain Flint, crawling with bugs, does at least provide a memorably lurid element of horror. The novel ends with an abrupt cliffhanger.
A half-baked jumble of poorly connected themes, incidents, and tropes. (Fantasy. 10-13)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9798886453164
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2025
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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