Headlong fun (with at least one sequel on the way), but readers will really have to work hard to suspend disbelief.
A geeky seventh grader's fantasies about becoming a "kick-butt spy" all come true when a new classmate clad in a business suit and mirror shades moves in next door.
Intrigued by the advent of sneering, hypercool "Derek Lance," Zeke does the logical thing and sneaks out that night to go through his new neighbor's garbage-whereupon he's picked up by a carload of plug uglies who mistake him for Lance. Zeke is interrogated about codes for something called "SirEebro," attacked by a mutant fire monster whose veins run with lava, rescued by a hot (if sharp-tongued) teenaged operative from SNURP ("The Strategic National Underground Reconnaissance Project") named Sparrow and catapulted into a desperate effort to scotch the evil scheme of costumed mastermind Mr. Le Carré. This evildoer plans to enslave humanity from an underground fortress with sound waves buried in a music video. Pinter, a writer of adult thrillers, keeps the action cranked up to full speed, but the "spy" and "superhero" tropes mix uneasily, and the characters seem labored. Unfortunately, this applies most notably to Zeke, who paradoxically maps himself at length as the familiar scorned, nonathletic, typecast suburban nerd but then goes on to display not only bottomless reserves of cool-headed pluck but also a secret underground lab of his own filled with fantastic techno-spy inventions.
Headlong fun (with at least one sequel on the way), but readers will really have to work hard to suspend disbelief. (Thriller. 11-13)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4022-5755-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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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