In a middle volume framed as a battle of the sexes, the author pulls some clever switcheroos (The School for Good and Evil, 2013).
A sincere if ill-timed wish summons Agatha and Sophie back to the twinned School for Good and Evil—to find it transformed into separate schools for girls and for boys. The latter is filled with brutal, callous, unwashed louts led (at first) by vengeful Tedros of Camelot. A scary new dean in the former has changed the fairy-tale textbooks to make all the male characters evil and instituted radical policies for the girls: “We wear pants, we don’t do our nails…we even eat cheese!” Though Chainani tries to keep the rival camps entirely separate by leaving out any hint of sex or even (a mighty pull between Agatha and Tedros aside) romance, Sophie’s temporary transformation into a boy at one point to sneak into the other school leads to a tender scene with Tedros. Another character turns out to be a spell-disguised boy who just preferred the girls’ school. Readers will be drawn in by set pieces, including the currently obligatory Hunger Games–style competition, but nearly all turn out to be incidental to the broader plot, which ends, of course, in a cliffhanger.
The closing volume should tie up those loose ends with, if the first two volumes are indicators, wild swings of terror and hilarity. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-210492-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Categories: CHILDREN'S SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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When deadly minions of archvillain Ledroptha Curtain escape from prison, the talented young protégés of his twin brother, Nicholas Benedict, reunite for a new round of desperate ploys and ingenious trickery.
Stewart sets the reunion of cerebral Reynie Muldoon Perumal, hypercapable Kate Wetherall, shy scientific genius George “Sticky” Washington, and spectacularly sullen telepath Constance Contraire a few years after the previous episode, The Mysterious Benedict Society and the Prisoner’s Dilemma (2009). Providing relief from the quartet’s continual internecine squabbling and self-analysis, he trucks in Tai Li, a grubby, precociously verbal 5-year-old orphan who also happens to be telepathic. (Just to even the playing field a bit, the bad guys get a telepath too.) Series fans will know to be patient in wading through all the angst, arguments, and flurries of significant nose-tapping (occasionally in unison), for when the main action does at long last get under way—the five don’t even set out from Mr. Benedict’s mansion together until more than halfway through—the Society returns to Nomansan Island (get it?), the site of their first mission, for chases, narrow squeaks, hastily revised stratagems, and heroic exploits that culminate in a characteristically byzantine whirl of climactic twists, triumphs, and revelations. Except for brown-skinned George and olive-complected, presumably Asian-descended Tai, the central cast defaults to white; Reynie’s adoptive mother is South Asian.
Clever as ever—if slow off the mark—and positively laden with tics, quirks, and puns. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-45264-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Megan Tingley/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Categories: CHILDREN'S MYSTERY & THRILLER | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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With their big brother Artemis off to Mars, 11-year-old twins Myles and Beckett are swept up in a brangle with murderous humans and even more dangerous magical creatures.
Unsurprisingly, the fraternal Irish twins ultimately prove equal to the challenge—albeit with help from, Colfer as omniscient narrator admits early on, a “hugely improbable finale.” Following the coincidental arrival on their island estate of two denizens of the subterranean fairy realm in the persons of a tiny but fearsome troll and a “hybrid” pixie-elf, or “pixel,” police trainee, the youngest Fowls immediately find themselves in the sights of both Lord Teddy Bleedham-Drye, a ruthless aristocrat out to bag said troll for its immorality-conferring venom, and Sister Jeronima Gonzalez-Ramos de Zárate, black-ops “nunterrogation” and knife specialist for ACRONYM, an intergovernmental fairy-monitoring organization. Amid the ensuing whirl of captures, escapes, trickery, treachery, and gunfire (none of which proves fatal…or at least not permanently), the twins leverage their complementary differences to foil and exasperate both foes: Myles being an Artemis mini-me who has dressed in black suits since infancy and loves coming up with and then “Fowlsplaining” his genius-level schemes; and Beckett, ever eager to plunge into reckless action and nearly nonverbal in English but with an extraordinary gift for nonhuman tongues. In the end they emerge triumphant, though threatened with mind wipe if they ever interfere in fairy affairs again. Yeah, right. Human characters seem to be default white; “hybrid” is used to describe nonhuman characters of mixed heritage.
Like its bestselling progenitors, a nonstop spinoff afroth with high tech, spectacular magic, and silly business. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-368-04375-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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