Readers looking for a story involving horses, magic, or a bit of Cuban history will do better looking elsewhere.
A young girl’s greatest fear is the loneliness of horselessness.
The story starts as the Spanish-American War ends. Estrellita is a young girl afflicted by rickets due to the lack of sunshine and proper nutrition experienced during the war when she and her mother were forced to remain hidden in a cave. Now out of the cave and in the city, Estrellita meets a man who rewards her imaginative storytelling by allowing her to groom his horses, and she eventually learns to ride. When a colt is born and becomes hers, a bond is forged between the two. Eventually Estrellita, the horse—Lucero, or Morning Star—and a large group of Cuban children end up at a progressive theosophist school in California. Horse and rider are separated, and by the time they reunite, the horse has grown wings and can fly. Engle combines a too-large number of intriguing though disparate elements as she works from beginning to unsatisfying ending: Cuban lore, alternative education, physical disabilities, a love of horses, magical flights in the air and underwater, mistrust, bullying, anger, bewilderment, and punishment. The resulting story is one that rambles more than it makes sense. The Spanish translation runs in parallel to the English text on facing pages; though for the most part it’s correct, it is at times too wordy, leading to awkwardness.
Readers looking for a story involving horses, magic, or a bit of Cuban history will do better looking elsewhere. (author’s note) (Historical verse novel. 10-13)Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-943050-25-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Horizon Bound
Review Posted Online: April 1, 2017
In this series debut, Maggie Sinclair tracks down a dognapper and solves a mystery about the noises in the walls of her Brooklyn brownstone apartment building. The 12-year-old heroine, who shares a middle name—Brooklyn—with her twin brother, Finn, is juggling two dogwalking jobs she’s keeping secret from her parents, and somehow she attracts the ire of the dogs’ former walker. Maggie tells her story in the first person—she’s self-possessed and likable, even when her clueless brother invites her ex–best friend, now something of an enemy, to their shared 12th birthday party. Maggie’s attention to details helps her to figure out why dogs seem to be disappearing and why there seem to be mice in the walls of her building, though astute readers will pick up on the solution to at least one mystery before Maggie solves it. There’s a brief nod to Nancy Drew, but the real tensions in this contemporary preteen story are more about friendship and boy crushes than skullduggery. Still, the setting is appealing, and Maggie is a smart and competent heroine whose personal life is just as interesting as—if not more than—her detective work. (Mystery. 10-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2010
ISBN: 967-1-59990-525-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2010
Writing as authority “Miss Edythe McFate,” Blume reveals that, even in New York, fairy folk are all around—having adapted to the urban environment—and so city children had best take special care not to run afoul of them. In two-dozen short chapters she introduces many types, explains their powers and (usually mischievous) proclivities and dispels common superstitions. She also suggests doable practices and strategies to stay on their good sides, such as leaving dishes of warm water, flower petals and Gummi bears around the house and ushering inchworms and ladybugs (all of which are fairy pets) found indoors back outside rather than killing them. Along with frequent weedy borders and corner spots, Foote adds portraits of chubby or insectile creatures, often in baroque attire. Interspersed with eight original tales (of children rescuing brownies ejected from the Algonquin Hotel during renovations, discovering a magical farm behind a door in the Lincoln Tunnel and so on), this collection of lore (much of it newly minted) offers an entertaining change of pace from the more traditional likes of Susannah Marriott’s Field Guide to Fairies (2009). (Informational fantasy. 10-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 14, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-375-86203-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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