A rollicking adventure.
More reanimated corpses rise to menace stalwart Swiss tinkerer Frances Stenzel and an expanding crew of allies in this sequel to Frances and the Monster (2022).
Forced to flee into the Black Forest when her train to Brussels is diverted, 12-year-old Frances goes from hunter (in the opener) to hunted for the refinements she made to her great-grandfather Albrecht’s imperfect method of bringing the dead to life. As it turns out, bad actors are conducting their own experiments at Fanggarten, an isolated nearby castle. While trying to elude a sinister hunter, reclaim Albrecht’s stolen notebook, and free a group of local villagers seized as experimental subjects, Frances is pursued by moaning revenants, suddenly feral pet dogs, and unnaturally large wolves. Despite struggling with social skills—in part a result of being raised in secret for years—Frances has and enlists allies galore, ranging from a snotty mechanical butler and a chimpanzee with a large sign language vocabulary to her parents, Victor and Mary (wink, wink), and a group of abandoned village children, including one who is deaf. The author opens with a note about different sign languages and shows a knack for describing hand and finger motions clearly. Though the book is set in 1940, there is no mention of Nazis and but one oblique reference to the war. Despite plenty of undead bodies, gunfire, animal attacks, and massive explosions, the casualties, if any, are scrupulously kept offstage. The cast reads white.
A rollicking adventure. (Adventure. 9-13)Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2023
ISBN: 978-0063085817
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel.
Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment.
Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. George and Harold link up in kindergarten to reduce a quartet of vicious bullies to giggling insanity with a relentless series of pranks involving shaving cream, spiders, effeminate spoof text messages and friendship bracelets. Pilkey tucks both topical jokes and bathroom humor into the cartoon art, and ups the narrative’s lexical ante with terms like “pharmaceuticals” and “theatrical flair.” Unfortunately, the bullies’ sad fates force Krupp to resign, so he’s not around to save the Earth from being destroyed later on by Talking Toilets and other invaders…
Is this the end? Well, no…the series will stagger on through at least one more scheduled sequel. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-17534-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
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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