An ambitious premise that never quite coalesces.
An anxious 11-year-old girl must save her loved ones from the soul-stealing Fear Maker.
One Halloween four years ago, Penny Hope left candy as an offering for the monster under her bed. She receives a gift in return, but it’s only after she accepts it that she realizes it’s cursed, plaguing her with recurring nightmares. In the daylight, Penny sees that everyone around her has blank, hollow eyes. She learns that the giver of the cursed gift, responsible for both her constant bad dreams and the vacant-eyed people, is the Fear Maker—and his power is quickly growing. Armed with her love of poetry and with new friend Aarush Banerjee by her side, can Penny conquer the Fear Maker before he reaps the souls of everyone around her? For much of Allen’s spine chiller, Penny’s struggles are internalized; her fear keeps her from reaching out to those around her. Slowly, she tells those she trusts most, and the narrative takes a turn, moving the needle to genuine scares as Penny and Aarush battle the Fear Maker at his terrifying haunted house. The horror aspects are immersive, but murky characterization and thin worldbuilding leave this novel feeling disjointed and faltering under its own weight. Prose and verse, including a variety of different poetic forms, are interestingly juxtaposed in short chapters. Penny reads White; Aarush is cued South Asian.
An ambitious premise that never quite coalesces. (Horror. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9780374390952
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Wholesome shading to bland, but well-stocked with exotic creatures and locales, plus an agreeable cast headed by a child...
A San Diego preteen learns that she’s an elf, with a place in magic school if she moves to the elves’ hidden realm.
Having felt like an outsider since a knock on the head at age 5 left her able to read minds, Sophie is thrilled when hunky teen stranger Fitz convinces her that she’s not human at all and transports her to the land of Lumenaria, where the ageless elves live. Taken in by a loving couple who run a sanctuary for extinct and mythical animals, Sophie quickly gathers friends and rivals at Foxfire, a distinctly Hogwarts-style school. She also uncovers both clues to her mysterious origins and hints that a rash of strangely hard-to-quench wildfires back on Earth are signs of some dark scheme at work. Though Messenger introduces several characters with inner conflicts and ambiguous agendas, Sophie herself is more simply drawn as a smart, radiant newcomer who unwillingly becomes the center of attention while developing what turn out to be uncommonly powerful magical abilities—reminiscent of the younger Harry Potter, though lacking that streak of mischievousness that rescues Harry from seeming a little too perfect. The author puts her through a kidnapping and several close brushes with death before leaving her poised, amid hints of a higher destiny and still-anonymous enemies, for sequels.
Wholesome shading to bland, but well-stocked with exotic creatures and locales, plus an agreeable cast headed by a child who, while overly fond of screaming, rises to every challenge. (Fantasy. 10-12)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-4593-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
On equal footing with a garden-variety potato.
The new kid in school endures becoming the school mascot.
Ben Hardy has never cared for potatoes, and this distaste has become a barrier to adjusting to life in his new Idaho town. His school’s mascot is the Spud, and after a series of misfortunes, Ben is enlisted to don the potato costume and cheer on his school’s team. Ben balances his duties as a life-sized potato against his desperate desire to hide the fact that he’s the dork in the suit. After all, his cute new crush, Jayla, wouldn’t be too impressed to discover Ben’s secret. The ensuing novel is a fairly boilerplate middle–grade narrative: snarky tween protagonist, the crush that isn’t quite what she seems, and a pair of best friends that have more going on than our hero initially believes. The author keeps the novel moving quickly, pushing forward with witty asides and narrative momentum so fast that readers won’t really mind that the plot’s spine is one they’ve encountered many times before. Once finished, readers will feel little resonance and move on to the next book in their to-read piles, but in the moment the novel is pleasant enough. Ben, Jayla, and Ben’s friend Hunter are white while Ellie, Ben’s other good pal, is Latina.
On equal footing with a garden-variety potato. (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: March 24, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-11866-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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