A quiet, unassuming, somewhat uneventful tale reinforcing the adage "there’s no place like home."
Stranded on a mysterious island, a young girl wonders if she’ll ever return to her family.
After the ship she’s traveling on with her aunt, uncle, and cousins encounters a storm, 11-year-old Pascale Chardon wakes up alone, adrift in a small boat. The tides carry her to the tiny tropical island of TeJÉ along with her only companion, a black beetle she’s named Inch. Until Pascale’s arrival, the island has never had a visitor, and she’s taken to the village Elders to see if she may be the Long Awaited, a prophesied stranger who will decide the community’s future. The previously uninhabited island was populated generations ago by people from around the world who left their societies in search of peaceful coexistence. Legend says that the islanders’ fate will be determined by whether the Long Awaited finds them living in peace and unity or conflict and strife. Pascale learns she must remain on TeJÉ for 17 days to determine if she’s the Long Awaited; however, she has no clue if she’s the Long Awaited and just wants to go home. Pascale settles into the daily rhythm of a caring, cooperative community, and events seem to unfold glacially, mirroring the idyllic island’s pace of life. When the long-awaited day finally arrives, the conclusion proves quite surprising. Pascale is presumably White; names point to the islanders’ multicultural ancestry.
A quiet, unassuming, somewhat uneventful tale reinforcing the adage "there’s no place like home." (Fantasy. 8-11)Pub Date: April 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-77086-647-8
Page Count: 220
Publisher: DCB
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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
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