An eventful and ultimately tender time-travel tale.
In Matthews’ middle-grade novel, a boy discovers on his 12th birthday that he can go back in time and alter the past.
One day, after Horace “Ace” Adler wishes for two extra minutes to finish his sixth-grade math final, he feels a sudden blast of freezing air and the classroom briefly becomes a deep-blue, starlit space. When normalcy resumes, the clock has rewound two minutes. The realization that he can time-travel leads Ace to embark on a series of quests. During his expeditions, he encounters a ghostly man wearing white who whisks him away to a giant floating clock with a wild-swinging pendulum that regulates time across the universe. It turns out that a crucial piece of the pendulum is missing; if it’s not found, the man says, the world will end, and it’s up to Ace, with his time-hopping skills, to save it. Before discovering his power, Ace had problems in his own life: His mom died five years earlier, his dad works two jobs (often leaving Ace to fend for himself), and the house where they moved a few years ago feels nothing like home. Now, the future of the planet rests on his shoulders as well. Ace confides in his smart best friend, Alexis, and it’s a race against time as the duo starts decoding clues. They involve unusual items and events that will fuel kids’ imaginations, including a watch belonging to Ace’s father that’s been hidden away; a copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time (1962), which was an unexpected birthday gift from Ace’s late mother; bizarre connections between the man in white and historic earthquakes; and an enlightening encounter with Christiaan Huygens, the Dutch astronomer who invented the pendulum clock. While the friends’ findings sometimes seem overly convenient, such as a report on natural disasters that’s assigned on the last week of school, and the twists leading to the surprising conclusion may strike some readers as slightly dizzying, the appealing mix of fantasy and reality, related in zippy prose, makes for an entertaining read.
An eventful and ultimately tender time-travel tale.Pub Date: March 29, 2024
ISBN: 9781970071801
Page Count: 199
Publisher: Bluebullseye Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A worthy combination of athletic action, the virtues of inner strength, and the importance of friendship.
A young tennis champion becomes the target of revenge.
In this sequel to Legacy and the Queen (2019), Legacy Petrin and her friends Javi and Pippa have returned to Legacy’s home province and the orphanage run by her father. With her friends’ help, she is in training to defend her championship when they discover that another player, operating under the protection of High Consul Silla, is presenting herself as Legacy. She is so convincing that the real Legacy is accused of being an imitation. False Legacy has become a hero to the masses, further strengthening Silla’s hold, and it becomes imperative to uncover and defeat her. If Legacy is to win again, she must play her imposter while disguised as someone else. Winning at tennis is not just about money and fame, but resisting Silla’s plans to send more young people into brutal mines with little hope of better lives. Legacy will have to overcome her fears and find the magic that allowed her to claim victory in the past. This story, with its elements of sports, fantasy, and social consciousness that highlight tensions between the powerful and those they prey upon, successfully continues the series conceived by late basketball superstar Bryant. As before, the tennis matches are depicted with pace and spirit. Legacy and Javi have brown skin; most other characters default to White.
A worthy combination of athletic action, the virtues of inner strength, and the importance of friendship. (Fantasy. 9-12)Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-949520-19-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Granity Studios
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
An enthralling fantasy debut exploring exploitation by those in power.
Will 12-year-old Nura be able to outsmart the trickster jinn and save herself and her friends?
Nura lives in the fictional Pakistani town of Meerabagh, where she has worked mining mica to help support her family of five—her mother, herself, and her three younger siblings—since her father’s death. In the mines she has the company of her best friend, Faisal, who is teased by other kids for his stutter, and she enjoys small pleasures like splurging on gulab jamun. Although Maa wants Nura to stop working and attend school, she has no interest in classroom learning and hopes to save up to send her younger siblings to school instead so they can break the family’s cycle of poverty. Following a mining accident in which Faisal and others are lost in the rubble, Nura goes to the rescue. In her quest, she is plunged into the magical, glittering jinn realm, where nothing is as it seems. The author seamlessly weaves into the worldbuilding of the story commentary on real-life problems such as the ravages of child labor and systems that perpetuate inequities. An informative author’s note further explores present-day global cycles of oppression as well as the life-changing power of education. This action-packed story set in a Muslim community moves at a fast pace, with evocative writing that brings the fantasy world to life and lyrical imagery to describe emotions.
An enthralling fantasy debut exploring exploitation by those in power. (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: July 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5795-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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