Flora fans will love old mysteries solved while new mysteries prep for volume four.
The bumbling-if-adorable heroine of Flora Segunda (2007) takes off on a less clownish adventure through a parallel North America.
Readers return to our heroine at a pivotal moment in her growth. For eight months Flora's been an obedient little cadet at the Benica Barracks Military Academy while silently chewing on the knowledge that her real mother isn't Buck Fyrdraaca, Commanding General of the Califan army. No, Flora's mother is the war criminal General Haðraaða, aka tiny Doom, aka Azota the whip: the Butcher Brakespeare herself. And she's alive. Flora performs a forbidden magical working to find her mother, but a wer-bear steals the map with Tiny Doom's location, and Flora must follow. Flora and her shapeshifting fellow traveler—Sieur Wraathmyr, half Kulani (Hawaiian) and half Varanger (Norwegian), when he's not being a bear—defeat an enchantress, befuddle pirates and overcome zombifying Birdies. Flora, both educated and tamed by her eight months in the barracks, is vastly more prepared to deal with the big bad world than in previous volumes. Though Califa and environs are every bit as wacky and flavorful as before, Flora herself is no longer so foolish a child. The result is both richer and less funny: Ridiculous mishaps have been replaced with sometimes-heartbreaking moments of personal growth (and an ancestral ghost octopus).
Flora fans will love old mysteries solved while new mysteries prep for volume four. (Fantasy. 12-15)Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-15-205409-0
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel,...
Adventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.
Elisa—Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle—has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone—and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra—can save them. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202648-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
Characters to love, quips to snort at, insights to ponder: typical Spinelli.
For two teenagers, a small town’s annual cautionary ritual becomes both a life- and a death-changing experience.
On the second Wednesday in June, every eighth grader in Amber Springs, Pennsylvania, gets a black shirt, the name and picture of a teen killed the previous year through reckless behavior—and the silent treatment from everyone in town. Like many of his classmates, shy, self-conscious Robbie “Worm” Tarnauer has been looking forward to Dead Wed as a day for cutting loose rather than sober reflection…until he finds himself talking to a strange girl or, as she would have it, “spectral maiden,” only he can see or touch. Becca Finch is as surprised and confused as Worm, only remembering losing control of her car on an icy slope that past Christmas Eve. But being (or having been, anyway) a more outgoing sort, she sees their encounter as a sign that she’s got a mission. What follows, in a long conversational ramble through town and beyond, is a day at once ordinary yet rich in discovery and self-discovery—not just for Worm, but for Becca too, with a climactic twist that leaves both ready, or readier, for whatever may come next. Spinelli shines at setting a tongue-in-cheek tone for a tale with serious underpinnings, and as in Stargirl (2000), readers will be swept into the relationship that develops between this adolescent odd couple. Characters follow a White default.
Characters to love, quips to snort at, insights to ponder: typical Spinelli. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-30667-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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