Despite cultural slips, this heart-rending story of love and loss, family ties, and friendship will keep readers hooked till...
Joiner’s debut novel draws readers in with familiar themes but raises the stakes by setting it during one of modern history’s most violent natural disasters—the eruption of Mount Krakatau in 1883.
Born in the Dutch East Indies, Katrien Courtlandt is Dutch by ancestry but Javanese by all other accounts. Katrien struggles to fit into the mold of a 13-year-old Dutch girl and would much rather be exploring the jungle with her best friend, indigenous boy Slamet, than learning how to sew from Tante Greet, who is trying to groom her into the perfect Dutch lady. Her carefree days end when Mount Krakatau erupts, spewing ash across the sky and snatching everything dear to her—her father, her aunt, her friend, and her home. As fate would have it, Katrien is thrown together with her nemesis, Brigitta, and the rivals must overcome their differences to survive not just the loss of their families, but also deadly tsunamis and extreme thirst and hunger. Despite contrived speech patterns (why do indigenous people speak Dutch translated into broken English and “in a thick accent” generations after the Dutch arrived?) and inaccuracies (a “kampong” is a village not a thatched cottage, and the so-called Javanese language used is actually Bahasa Indonesia), the story is saved by an intriguing, if at times incredible, storyline.
Despite cultural slips, this heart-rending story of love and loss, family ties, and friendship will keep readers hooked till the end. (Historical fiction. 10-15)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3441-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
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