Fans of gross-out humor and hand-wavy science will have a blast if they can stomach a mostly white 26th century; others...
It’s easy to steal a spaceship by mistake. It’s a little harder to steal a sun.
Thirteen-year-old Kyler Centaurus doesn’t exactly mean to steal his family’s cruiser spaceship. But he’s steamed enough at his rambunctious, bullying brothers and his parents’ one-sided adjudication of sibling fights that he does program the ship as getaway transport. Although he changes his mind, he accidentally hits the “execute” button while sleeping alone onboard. Elsewhere in the universe, mutant Figerella Jammeslot, also 13, hires herself out to space pirates. She’s never blown up a sun before, but she’s gifted at demolition, poor, and an orphan—she needs the money. Ky’s and Fig’s paths converge in a rollicking space adventure centered on the theft and use for terrorism of a portable, artificial sun (readers should pack their disbelief-suspenders) and colored by Harry Potter references, slapstick, and copious jokes in the fart/armpit genres. Although the text offers overt political commentary on despotic rule, corporate power, and media control, its exploration of (real-world–analogous) ethnic, racial, religious, and refugee oppression is diluted by being only metaphorical—and it’s bleached out by the fact that somehow everyone appears to be white except one morally corrupt brown person.
Fans of gross-out humor and hand-wavy science will have a blast if they can stomach a mostly white 26th century; others should look to Kevin Emerson’s Last Day on Mars (2017) instead. (Science fiction. 8-11)Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4847-5023-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
Dizzyingly silly.
The famous superhero returns to fight another villain with all the trademark wit and humor the series is known for.
Despite the title, Captain Underpants is bizarrely absent from most of this adventure. His school-age companions, George and Harold, maintain most of the spotlight. The creative chums fool around with time travel and several wacky inventions before coming upon the evil Turbo Toilet 2000, making its return for vengeance after sitting out a few of the previous books. When the good Captain shows up to save the day, he brings with him dynamic action and wordplay that meet the series’ standards. The Captain Underpants saga maintains its charm even into this, the 11th volume. The epic is filled to the brim with sight gags, toilet humor, flip-o-ramas and anarchic glee. Holding all this nonsense together is the author’s good-natured sense of harmless fun. The humor is never gross or over-the-top, just loud and innocuous. Adults may roll their eyes here and there, but youngsters will eat this up just as quickly as they devoured every other Underpants episode.
Dizzyingly silly. (Humor. 8-10)Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-545-50490-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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
SEEN & HEARD
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