Fresh from an encounter with ghost mastodons (Six Haunted Hairdos, 1997), Miss Earth’s fifth-grade class readily takes on a new challenge in this eccentric holiday story from Maguire. When Mayor Timothy Grass disappears, all of Hamlet, Vermont, is abuzz with rumors; in Miss Earth’s class opinion is about evenly divided between the Tattletales (girls), who think he fell into a time warp, and the Copycats (boys), who blame Bigfoot. Neutral Pearl Hotchkiss’s suggestion that he was abducted by aliens is discounted, but she’s right. Having glimpsed a Christmas movie on the visor screen before their crash landing, five aliens from planet Fixipuddle are out to free the slaves from “Santa Claw’s” workshop and end his evil domination of the world; when Mayor Grass strolls by, still in his Santa suit from a school visit, they tie him up and apply tickle torture to make him reveal the location of his Fortress of Fear (the workshop). After an unsuccessful attempt to disguise themselves as Keebler-style elves, the aliens recruit Lois Kennedy’s beagle, Reebok, to spy for them, equipping him with a universal translator that allows him to talk. Their mistake: Reebok’s a double agent. The Tattletales and Copycats accept Reebok’s story, put aside all rivalries, and spring into action, converting the classroom into a “workshop” of broken toys for the aliens to “liberate.” This clever comedy, with humor both broad and sly, has the odd combination of hilariously fractious aliens and a generous measure of Christmas cheer—but it works. (b&w illustrations, not seen) (Fiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-83894-0
Page Count: 170
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
A fizzy mix of low humor and brisk action, with promise of more of both to come.
Heroic deeds await Isaac after his little sister runs into the school basement and is captured by elves.
Even though their school is a spooky old castle transplanted stone by stone from Germany, Isaac and his two friends, Max and Emma, little suspect that an entire magical kingdom lies beneath—a kingdom run by elves, policed by oversized rats in uniform, and populated by captives who start out human but undergo transformative “weirding.” These revelations await Isaac and sidekicks as they nerve themselves to trail his bossy younger sib, Lily, through a shadowy storeroom and into a tunnel, across a wide lake, and into a city lit by half-human fireflies, where they are cast together into a dungeon. Can they escape before they themselves start changing? Gibson pits his doughty rescuers against such adversaries as an elven monarch who emits truly kingly belches and a once-human jailer with a self-picking nose. Tests of mettle range from a riddle contest to a face-off with the menacing head rat Shelfliver, and a helter-skelter chase finally leads rescuers and rescued back to the aboveground. Plainly, though, there is further rescuing to be done.
A fizzy mix of low humor and brisk action, with promise of more of both to come. (Fantasy. 9-11)Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62370-255-7
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Capstone Young Readers
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
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