A fast-paced, funny, and satisfying space tale, with a warm family feeling.
When aliens kidnap a boy, his older brother, his grandmother, and her spaceship come to the rescue in this middle-grade SF novel.
People have been thinking that Grandma Mullin is crazy ever since, a few months ago, she claimed that aliens yanked her husband into their spaceship through a beam of light. He hasn’t been seen since. Nevertheless, while their parents take a cruise, George Mullin, 11, and his younger brother, Pete, are being sent to their grandmother’s house, flying from California to Colorado. Grandma wins over her grandsons with root beer floats, new high-tops, and July Fourth bottle rockets—and then, the aliens come back to abduct Pete. Grandma reveals that she’s not crazy; she’s an alien hunter with her own spaceship hidden in the backyard, which takes her and George to the extraterrestrials’ home, Planet Flerk. In a crash landing, Grandma breaks her leg, and George has to set out alone with nothing but a tracking device, a slingshot, and a lighter. He faces many dangers, including murderous dwarves and pirates, but gains allies, such as Rover, a talking Labrador dog/hippo; and Slim, a cabin boy aboard the pirates’ spaceship. As George performs more than one rescue, he figures out his future profession: “Kicking some alien butt” is “what we Mullins do.” Trine (The Revenge of the McNasty Brothers, 2015, etc.), a prolific author of children’s books, writes a very entertaining space adventure/coming-of-age tale. George’s road to realizing his destiny parallels his newfound appreciation of his grandparents, both former test pilots, and their daring spirits. The book also succeeds as a comic novel, with many amusing scenarios. For example, in Flerk’s rather tentative police force, one cop responds to a hovercraft theft by yelling polite requests for its return: “Do the right thing! I mean it!” Trine packs a lot of action and a few surprises into his story, keeping things effectively moving, with a pleasing conclusion that leaves open the possibility of further escapades. Koehler’s (Santa’s Dog, 2018, etc.) quirky, cool, stylish illustrations deftly match the text.
A fast-paced, funny, and satisfying space tale, with a warm family feeling.Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73395-895-0
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Malamute Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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