The natural balance between life and death looks decidedly unsteady in this nail-biter.
Conflicting loyalties and a continuing struggle for leadership of the beleaguered water buffalo herd signal an ominous resurgence of death’s spirit, the Great Devourer, on the African plain.
In this sequel to The Shattered Horn (2023), visionary hyena Breathstealer is pushed to choose between the high principles of the life-nurturing Great Spirit and her own species’ ancient loyalty to the Great Devourer, the bringer of death (and therefore food). The unexpected return of young Echo to the buffalo herd rekindles a battle with massive, murderous bully Holler for dominance on the dusty, dry-season grasslands. Meanwhile, the cheetah Stride and his gruff companion, Stonehide the honey badger, have both caught tantalizing glimpses of their dead mates, who are trapped, along with other animal spirits, by the Great Devourer and are therefore unable to ascend to the stars. Though a brief encounter with a chattery colony of meerkats lightens the tone for at least a moment, overall, the atmosphere is one of heavy impending doom. The events tend toward angry disputes and savage clashes (not to mention eerie, unnatural eruptions of stinging scorpions and insects) involving multiple characters nursing bad intents or guilty secrets. Still, the closing affirmation of Starlight, the wise Great Mother elephant, that “miracles are all around us” offers a morsel of hope to carry readers to the next episode.
The natural balance between life and death looks decidedly unsteady in this nail-biter. (Animal fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9780062967008
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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