Richly imagined and excitingly paced.
A 13-year-old pursues adventure—and finds danger—on Venus.
Following the events of Moongarden (2022), Myra, now a second-year student at the Scientific Lunar Academy of Magic, goes with friends to the Venusian Academy of Magical Arts as an exchange student. It’s an opportunity to follow up on her missing friend, Hannah, and perhaps to discover how the clones known as Repetitions are being stopped from using their magic. The new school is a revelatory experience. The students at V.A.M.A. use their Creers to create art using principles of math, chemistry, and electricity. Myra’s own Creer combination of botanical prowess and magic blooms unexpectedly on Venus when seeds she rescued from the moongarden’s plants get spilled into the artificial sea surrounding the school. Noah, a classmate whose Creer lies in the culinary arts, assists her in nurturing and guarding the resulting garden. In these planetary colonies, most characters are cued white, but a few, including Noah, are described as having dark skin; race holds no significance. Myra struggles with feeling like an outsider as her lunar friends find new friends on Venus, while her pursuit of corporate cover-ups around food production creates larger, more dangerous challenges. The satisfying cliffhanger of an ending to this second book in the series will leave readers eager for the next installment.
Richly imagined and excitingly paced. (Science fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781645951292
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pixel+Ink
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Korman’s trademark humor makes this an appealing read.
Will a bully always be a bully?
That’s the question eighth-grade football captain Chase Ambrose has to answer for himself after a fall from his roof leaves him with no memory of who and what he was. When he returns to Hiawassee Middle School, everything and everyone is new. The football players can hardly wait for him to come back to lead the team. Two, Bear Bratsky and Aaron Hakimian, seem to be special friends, but he’s not sure what they share. Other classmates seem fearful; he doesn’t know why. Temporarily barred from football because of his concussion, he finds a new home in the video club and, over time, develops a new reputation. He shoots videos with former bullying target Brendan Espinoza and even with Shoshanna Weber, who’d hated him passionately for persecuting her twin brother, Joel. Chase voluntarily continues visiting the nursing home where he’d been ordered to do community service before his fall, making a special friend of a decorated Korean War veteran. As his memories slowly return and he begins to piece together his former life, he’s appalled. His crimes were worse than bullying. Will he become that kind of person again? Set in the present day and told in the alternating voices of Chase and several classmates, this finding-your-middle-school-identity story explores provocative territory. Aside from naming conventions, the book subscribes to the white default.
Korman’s trademark humor makes this an appealing read. (Fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-338-05377-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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