Natalie Babbitt's prose is as clean as her pen line, yet unexpectable: the Mammoth Mountains "were the only point of interest in a countryside that neither rolled nor dipped but lay as flat as if it had been knocked unconscious." One is taller, decidedly more clifflike, its crest shrouded in mist—and mystery—for on stormy, rainy nights "an undiscovered creature would lift its voice and moan. . ." This is Kneeknock Rise, at its foot the village of Instep, whose inhabitants thrive on their fearsome distinction and from the fair that annually brings the envious to eat and dance. . . and tremble at the voice of the Megrimum. So that when Egan, taunted by Cousin Ada, climbs as he's thought to do, dreamed of doing. . . and returns to tell the unforbidding tale, why—"He doesn't know what he's saying." Vagabond Uncle Ott, encountered at the top, knew, and put it into the rhyme of a cat playing mouse with a string: "He didn't thank me when/ I told him he was wrong./ It's possible—just possible—/ He knew it all along." The wind-up takes longer than it need though the Megrimum restored is an exquisite bit of megrimummery. As, earlier, is Uncle Anson's kneeknock-bird clock 'killed' by disagreeable Sweetheart the cat because "the Megrimum wants them to." But Megrimum or not, Kneeknock Rise has Uncle Ott's left-behind dog Annabelle, "old and fat and beautiful" and not the coward Ada calls her. Like The Search. . . delicious.
Pub Date: May 29, 1970
ISBN: 0312370091
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1970
Categories: CHILDREN'S MYSTERY & THRILLER
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Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S MYSTERY & THRILLER
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An animal ghost seeks closure after enduring aquatic atrocities.
In this sequel to The Incredibly Dead Pets of Rex Dexter (2020), sixth grader Rex is determined to once again use his ability to communicate with dead animals for the greater good. A ghost narwhal’s visit gives Rex his next opportunity in the form of the clue “bad water.” Rex enlists Darvish—his Pakistani American human best friend—and Drumstick—his “faithful (dead) chicken”—to help crack the case. But the mystery is only one of Rex’s many roadblocks. For starters, Sami Mulpepper hugged him at a dance, and now she’s his “accidental girlfriend.” Even worse, Darvish develops one of what Rex calls “Game Preoccupation Disorders” over role-playing game Monsters & Mayhem that may well threaten the pair’s friendship. Will Rex become “a Sherlock without a Watson,” or can the two make amends in time to solve the mystery? This second outing effectively carries the “ghost-mist” torch from its predecessor without feeling too much like a formulaic carbon copy. Spouting terms like plausible deniability and in flagrante delicto, Rex makes for a hilariously bombastic (if unlikable) first-person narrator. The over-the-top style is contagious, and black-and-white illustrations throughout add cartoony punchlines to various scenes. Unfortunately, scenes in which humor comes at the expense of those with less status are downright cringeworthy, as when Rex, who reads as White, riffs on the impossibility of his ever pronouncing Darvish’s surname or he plays dumb by staring into space and drooling.
Funny delivery, but some jokes really miss the mark. (Paranormal mystery. 8-12)Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5523-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
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