Icon: Diverse Characters

Minecraft: The Crash

Bianca doesn’t think before she acts because her best friend, Lonnie, has always been there to catch her when she falls. But when Bianca and Lonnie are in a horrific car crash, Bianca learns that thoughtless actions can lead to severe consequences for her and for others.

Bianca wakes up in the hospital with painful injuries. She is afraid to find out what has happened to Lonnie—did he survive or has Bianca lost her best friend? To avoid the painful truths of reality, Bianca jumps into the virtual reality world of Minecraft. When she meets a glitching avatar that might be Lonnie, Bianca vows to do everything she can to help Lonnie in the virtual world.

Bianca teams up with Esme and Anton, two other kids who are in the hospital. While in the Minecraft world, the kids must face dangerous mobs that are generated by their fears and insecurities. With the help of her new friends, can Bianca overcome her fears and return to reality?

Minecraft: The Crash begins with a graphic crash scene, which leaves Bianca wondering what happened to Lonnie. Bianca’s resulting fear and guilt conflict drive much of the story. Her time in the Minecraft world adds interest to those who play the game, but fans may not like that the story does not stay true to the actual Minecraft game. Instead, the author changed many of the game’s elements to fit the story’s plot. On the other hand, if someone is not familiar with the Minecraft game some events will be confusing.

Bianca, Esme, and Anton interact like typical teenagers—they argue and disagree, but they also work together (most of the time.) Esme and Anton show the importance of working together to solve a problem. They also encourage Bianca to face her issues. Esme and Anton are likeable characters who stick with Bianca through everything. However, Bianca is hard to relate to because she comes off as a self-centered person who is dishonest when it benefits her. Although Esme and Anton are doing everything they can to help her, Bianca does little to contribute to the group’s plan. Instead, she does what she wants even if it may cause harmful consequences to others. Although she feels guilty for causing the car accident, she has not learned from the event.

The length of the book, the complexity of the plot, and some difficult vocabulary combine to make Minecraft: The Crash more appropriate for middle-school readers than younger readers, as does the fact that the story deals with the difficult topic of death. Although Bianca recognizes that she is to blame for Lonnie’s death, the ending of the story does not acknowledge the long-term ramifications of the car crash or the pain Lonnie’s death caused others. Despite these drawbacks, this book will keep readers who want to jump into the Minecraft world entertained with battle after battle.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • Bianca and her friend are in a car crash. Bianca could see the driver of the other car; “his head lurched back as his green car collided with our blue one.” During the crash, “there was the smell of smoke. And the taste of blood. And the scrape of something against my body that felt like it had gutted me open somewhere in the middle. I wondered if I’d been halved.” Bianca is seriously injured. Her friend dies.
  • While in the Minecraft word, Bianca meets a zombie mob. She began “plowing through green guys with the sword like an Amazon warrior. . . I was screaming and chopping and generally having a great time until one of them hit me, and the energy bar at the top of my vision went down half a heart.” The battle takes place over three pages. During that time, Bianca kills zombies. When she kills one, “green slime burst in pixelated arcs that fell on the ground and disappeared in seconds.”
  • While in the Minecraft world, Bianca tries to go into another player’s house. She triggers an explosion and “blocks exploded, lava erupted, and a series of sparks bloomed in front of my eyes.
  • Spiders charge the three kids. Bianca “picked up my sword again and hacked at the charging spider. It broke into blue pieces and fell to the ground . . .” Then Anton “did a spin and swiped at another spider. It broke apart, but the river of spiders just kept pouring out of the house.”
  • A group of villagers attacks and “they all turned on us, mercilessly raining down blows. . . Anton got the brunt of the blows.”
  • While in a tunnel, zombies attack. Lonnie and Esme “started slashing through the mob. . .” Later, creepers appear. As Bianca tried to escape, “creepers pressing in. One on the far end popped and set off a chain reaction.”
  • Witches begin throwing potions at the group. As Bianca was fleeing, “a potion hit me and exploded. My movements instantly became slower. My heath bar over my head dipped. . . . Ashton kept on hitting until the witch died.”
  • A line of endermen appear and “this group seemed to be gunning for us, arms outstretched in attack mode. . . I swung my sword, just missing it, and giving it enough time to reach me. My health points took a big hit when it landed a blow. . . The endermen pounded me with its fists. I put my arms up, unable to do anything else. . .” The battle takes place over two pages.
  • Endermen attack the group again. Endermen “rained down on us like black hail. . . Esme fired arrow after arrow into the crowd of them. I hacked my way through at one side . . .”
  • When Bianca’s friends try to get her to leave the game, she “thought about the TNT I had in my inventory, and how I needed a distraction. It suddenly appeared and detonated instantly in front of us. We were blown back in different directions. My heath bar took a major hit.” Bianca’s friends were “thrown back into the exit portal.” They were forced out of the game.
  • A slime mob attacks a house. Bianca “charged in, giving my best warrior yell. I bashed through the little slimes that were at my feet while keeping the skeletons away from Lonnie.” The battle takes place over three pages.
  • Zombies come into a bobby-trapped house. When the zombies got to the door, “there was the click of a trigger, and the sound of a low whistle that got louder and louder, and then bam! Both of them got smashed by an anvil.” The battle takes place over two pages.
  • While in the bobby-trapped house, Bianca steps on a pressure plate. She runs, but “a series of flaming arrows flew towards us. Most stuck in the ground, burning in place, but a few of them hit us. The sharp stab of the arrow piercing me was bad enough, but the fire . . . I started to crawl away, but Lonnie sat where he was, pinned by three arrows that hit his legs and arm. . . d” No one is seriously injured.
  • Zombies attack again. Bianca “continued slashing with my sword while pushing Lonnie backward, away from danger. . . a zombie hit me, sending me sprawling. My body felt leaden as I hit the floor, and I didn’t know if I had the energy to escape the approaching zombie. . . “ Lonnie pulls her to safety.
  • Bianca and Esme get into an argument. Bianca “pushed her to the ground and started to hit her with my fist, but she was back up on her feet a moment later, punching back. . . I pulled my hands up to shield my face, hoping the blows would end soon, and a moment later she stopped.” Someone pulls Esme off Bianca.
  • A scarred enderman appears and Bianca “thrust upward with the sword. I caught the enderman’s arm. It staggered back a step, but then reached around with its other arm to strike me. . . the enderman’s arm flashed out, lightening quick, thwacking my face. The blow burned like fire. . .” Esme shoots the enderman, but others appear. Anton has TNT so he “lobbed the bombs over our heads as we kept firing. . .” The group is able to escape. The battle takes place over 2 ½ pages.
  • Witches ambush Bianca. “They pelted potions, and I warded them off with my sword as best I could. Then I charged the closet witch—the one on my right—slashing until it died, droppings ticks and glass bottles.” Someone saves Bianca.
  • Wither skeletons with swords attach the group. “Anton killed one at close range by sticking its torso, and one of Esme’s arrows found its target, destroying the third one.”
  • Ender pirates attack. Bianca tries to escape, but one “extended its hand and knocked me over. I fell to the floor, but I didn’t seem to have taken much damage. The fighting continued around and over me for a second before I regained my footing.” The battle continues for 3 ½ pages and ends when Anton detonates an explosion, “The yellow and orange of the bomb was bright against the sky. . . I (Bianca) jumped up onto the rail, and dove into the water as the pirate ship blew up behind me.”
  • Someone steps on a pressure plate and enemies appear. “The silverfish looked vicious, and they came straight toward us with their jaws unhinged, as if they meant to take a bite out of anyone who got close enough. . . They swarmed around us, unrelenting and hideous, but our armor kept us relatively safe. . .” They escape through a portal.
  • Bianca and her friends jump through a portal, but an enderman appears and grabs Bianca. “The enderman grabbed me by the hand, pulled me backwards, and threw me down on the ground. It kneeled over me, wrapped its hands around my neck, and squeezed. I choked for air. My legs and arms flailed as I tried to dislodge myself from the enderman’s grasp.” The game glitches and Bianca reappears somewhere else.
  • In a final battle, Bianca and her friends fight a dragon. “Its eyes blazed as it charged straight toward us. I could feel the heated air radiating from its flapping wings. . . The dragon dropped its wing and clipped Anton on his back. He lurched forward, landing at Lonnie’s feet and staring up at the sky.” The battle takes place over 10 pages.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • While in the hospital, doctors gave Bianca painkillers. When she woke up, she “considered that the drugs were making me loopy.” Later Bianca’s father is told that doctors have “administered the strongest painkillers we can under the circumstances. . .”

Language

  • Darn, jeez, heck, and crap are each used one time.
  • Pissed is used five times. For example, Bianca thinks that another player “looked pissed.”
  • Anton says that Esme is “a jerk sometimes.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

The Sword of Summer

Magnus Chase isn’t your average 16-year-old kid. After a terrible incident that killed his mother, Magnus was forced to survive on the harsh streets of Boston for two years. Then everything changes, and not necessarily for the better when Magnus discovers the truth about his parentage. This knowledge is dangerous, and after attempting to outmaneuver his suspicious Uncle Randolph, Magnus lands in more trouble than he ever has before.

Escaping who he believes to be evil, Magnus falls into the hands of his worst enemy, a fire giant named Surt. Magnus dies and his soul is sent to Valhalla, the hall of warriors who will fight with Odin during Ragnarok (the end of the world). This is the beginning of an unlikely story of emotional growth, the development of strength, and the family found in friendship.

Fans of Rick Riordan’s previous works will be pleased as they travel into a fascinating world of Norse mythology. A character from the beloved Percy Jackson and the Olympians series even makes a cameo, making a fun crossover between magical worlds.

This family-friendly adventure is an exciting ride throughout. The characters are well developed and believable, but the sheer amount of characters may become confusing for less attentive readers. Nevertheless, even the timidest readers will enjoy this story as it is filled with well-placed humor. The plot is action-packed, leaving readers excited to turn the next page.

Although this book is entertaining and amusing, there are battles with monsters throughout the book that may upset some readers. The battles are not told in gory detail, but characters are injured and must deal with the consequences of their battles. Ultimately, Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard: The Sword of Summer is a delightful read full of humor, action, and magic.

Sexual Content

  • Samirah has an arranged marriage to Amir Fadlan. When Magnus questions her feelings on the matter, Sam responds, “Ugh! You don’t get it. I’ve been in love with Amir since I was twelve.”
  • Every time a giant comes to barter or make a deal with Freya, the goddess of love, sex, beauty, fertility, and gold, they always ask for her hand in marriage.
  • Magnus’s father Frey lost the Sword of Summer because he fell madly in love with a frost giantess. The only way that he could heal his heart was by offering the Sword of Summer to Skirnir.
  • Freya has lots of dwarven children. Every time she wants jewelry made by dwarves, she goes to Nidavellir and marries a dwarf in exchange for their craftsmanship. These one-day marriages each end with a child. This interaction is not described beyond this, but it is acknowledged that Blitzen is a child of Freya and a dwarf.
  • Magnus describes his first kiss when he is involuntarily given mouth-to-mouth by a goat. “My only previous experience with kissing had been with Jackie Molotov in seventh grade, behind the bleachers at a school dance…. Anyway, with apologies to Jackie, getting mouth-to-mouth from a goat reminded me of her.”
  • In the past, a son of Loki was sent to Valhalla and fell in love with the lead Valkyrie, Gunilla, but he “betrayed her. Turned out she was a spy for [Loki]. Broke her heart.”
  • After Halfborn nearly sacrifices his life for Mallory in battle, they are on good terms, and it appears that there may be romance in the future for them. “As my hallmates headed back home, I was happy to see Halfborn Gunderson slip his arm around Mallory Keen’s waist. She didn’t even cut his hand off for doing so.”

Violence

  • Magnus engages in a battle with the fire giant, Surt. “I smacked Surt in the head with my rusty sword. . . The blade didn’t seem to hurt him, but the swirling flames died. . . Then he punched me in the gut.” Later in the battle, “Surt kicked me in the ribs and sent me sprawling. . . Surt must have kicked me hard enough to trigger a near-death hallucination.” After a brief time period, Magnus’s sword begins to act on its own and guides Magnus’s actions. “It spun in an arc, dragging my arm along with it, and hacked into Surt’s right leg. The Black One screamed. The wound in his thigh smoldered, setting his pants on fire . . . Before he could recover, my sword leaped upward and slashed his face. With a howl, Surt stumbled back, cupping his hands over his nose. . . Just as he reached me, my sword leaped up and ran him through.”
  • Magnus describes his death. “I actually died. One hundred percent: guts impaled, vital organs burned, head smacked into a frozen river from forty feet up, every bone in my body broken, lungs filled with ice water…. It hurt. A lot.”
  • When getting a tour of Hotel Valhalla, Magnus is “pushed down as a spear flew past. It impaled a guy sitting on the nearest sofa, killing him instantly.” The guy is already dead, so this is just a temporary “death” as he will regenerate in a few hours.
  • Magnus and all those who inhabit Hotel Valhalla observe how newly inducted einherjar (inhabitants of Hotel Valhalla) died. In one video, a warrior “saved a bunch of kids at her village school when a warlord’s soldiers had tried to kidnap them. She’d flirted with one of the soldiers, tricked him into letting her hold his assault rifle, then turned it on the warlord’s men . . . The video was pretty violent.”
  • Mallory is excited to “see the new boy get dismembered.”
  • The einherjar participate in practice battle exercises to prepare for Ragnarok, when the nine worlds will fall. One of these “battles” is comically described, but each “death” is also shown. Many characters get shot, punched, or stabbed to “death” in the heat of battle.
  • In a dream, Surt threatens Magnus by saying, “When we meet again, you will burn, son of Frey. You and your friends will be my tinder. You will start the fire that burns the nine worlds.”
  • Samirah attacks Magnus after he leaves Valhalla. “She charged from behind the concession building and kicked me in the chest, propelling me backwards into a tree. My lungs imploded like paper sacks.”
  • An eagle drags Magnus away from his friends to convince him to do something for him. “The eagle veered, slamming me into the fire escape. I felt my ribs crack, like vials of acid breaking inside my chest. My empty stomach tried unsuccessfully to hurl.”
  • When Blitzen competes in a dwarf craftsmanship competition, Magnus acts as his bodyguard. “A random dwarf charged me from the side-lines, swinging an axe and screaming, ‘BLOOD!’ I hit him in the head with the hilt of my sword. He collapsed.”
  • Otis, a goat who belongs to Thor, marvels at Magnus’s talking sword. Otis exclaims, “I’ve never been killed by a talking sword before. That’s fine. If you could just make a clean cut right across the throat-”
  • For Odin to learn the secrets of the runes, he sacrificed an eye and “fashioned a noose and hanged himself from a branch of the World Tree for nine days.”
  • Magnus attacks and kills two giantess sisters. Magnus threw a knife and, “The spinning steak knife hit her in the chest. It didn’t impale her . . .She lowered hands, grabbing instinctively for her chest, which allowed Jack full access to her nose. A second later, Gjalp was lying dead on the floor next to her sister.”
  • The book concludes with a giant final battle in which warriors of Valhalla fight fire giants and attempt to rebind Fenris’ wolf. Within this battle, several warriors get hurt and three Valkyries die, including Gunilla. “Blitzen was so angry—between the Wolf gloating about his dad’s death and Surt stealing his fashion ideas—that he howled like Crazy Alice in Chinatown and rammed his harpoon right through the giant’s gut. The fire giant stumbled off, belching flames and taking the harpoon with him.” “Halfborn Gunderson buried his axe in the breastplate of a giant. X picked up another fire-breather and tossed him off the side of the ridge. Mallory and T.J. fought back-to-back, jabbing and slashing and dodging blasts of flame.”
  • Magnus’s Uncle Randolph is poisoned by Loki. “Randolph smelled the poison before he felt it. Acrid steam curled into his nostrils. The side of his face erupted in white-hot pain. He fell to his knees, his throat seizing up in shock.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Magnus thinks, “Random police and park rangers I could deal with. Truant officers, community service volunteers, drunken college kids, addicts looking to roll somebody small and weak—all those would’ve been as easy to wake up to as pancakes and orange juice.”
  • The mead of Valhalla doesn’t contain alcohol as it is magical goat milk that tastes like a mixture of delicious flavors. However, this topic makes Magnus share his own experience with alcohol. Magnus says, “Yes, I’ve tried alcohol, thrown up, tried alcohol again, thrown up.”
  • The god Aegir is a brewer who “spends all his time at the hops shop, or going on brewery tours with his buddies…. He’s always talking about microbrews. He has a cauldron a mile wide!”
  • Magnus and his friends go to Nabbi’s tavern and the dwarves that he travels with order mead (not the Valhalla kind).
  • Thor, the thunder god, “loved drinking mead.”
  • When the group comes across giantess sisters, the enormous monsters are drunk. Magnus thinks, “They’d obviously been hitting the mead pretty hard.”

 Language

  • Profanity is used a few times throughout the book. Profanity includes ass, dammit, crap, and idiot.
  • Many characters exclaim, “Gods of Asgard” and “gods” as a form of profanity.
  • When Gunilla introduces a new video system that shows how einherjar die, “the warriors cheered and banged their mugs, drowning out the sound of Sam cursing next to me.”
  • Magnus is angry towards a Valkyrie that he dislikes and thinks, “No, but your dad was apparently a jackass!”
  • While trying to escape Valhalla, “Mallory cursed in what was maybe Gaelic. Our little hallway group was a veritable United Nations of Cussing.”
  • When attempting to arrange his dead body, Magnus’s “hands had come unclasped so I appeared to be giving everybody the finger.”
  • When Blitzen talks about his mother’s requests, he says, “She wants her damnable earrings.”
  • Thor could “cuss like a drunken, creative sailor. ‘Mother-grubbing scum bucket!’ he yelled (or something along those lines. My brain may have filtered the actual language, as it would’ve made my ears bleed.)”
  • Magnus wants to comfort Hearthstone. “I wanted to hug the poor guy, bake him a batch of cookies, and tell him how sorry I was about his crappy childhood, but I knew he wouldn’t want pity.”

Supernatural

  • The story exists in a world where Norse mythology is real, including all of the gods, heroes, and monsters. For example, Magnus is the son of Frey, the god of peace, fertility, rain, sunshine, and summer.
  • In the beginning of the book, Magnus doesn’t understand why Blitzen hates daylight. He says, “Maybe he was the world’s shortest, stoutest homeless vampire.”
  • Two magical, evil wolves broke into Magnus’s apartment and killed his mom when he was fourteen. “From the hallway, two beasts emerged, their pelts the color of dirty snow, their eyes glowing blue.”
  • Surt is a fire god and has powers. “Around Surt, flames began to swirl. The firestorm spiraled outward, melting cars to slag heaps, liquefying the pavement, popping rivets from the bridge like champagne corks.”
  • Due to Magnus being a demigod, he has magical abilities. He doesn’t have a problem in extreme temperatures, can walk through fire, can heal others, and mentally communicates with horses.
  • There is a vala who is a “seer. She can cast spells, read the future, and… other stuff.” She can also read/use the runes, which is a form of non-inherited Norse magic.
  • Hearthstone is an elf, and Blitzen is a dwarf. Their identity gives them special abilities like fashion sense, craftsmanship, and rune magic.
  • As an einherjar, Magus acquires super strength, has more muscles, and has accelerated healing.
  • Heartstone uses rune stones and eventually becomes a runemaster. These stones allow him to perform magic, usually to help his friends on their quest.
  • The group encounters Mimir, a disembodied head who floats in water and knows the secrets of the nine worlds.
  • The Sword of Summer is a magical weapon that Magnus wields. It can speak and fight on its own. Magnus transforms it into a stone on a chain that he wears around his neck. Magnus “could easily pull it off the chain. As soon as I did, the stone grew into a sword. If I wanted it back in pendant form, all I had to do was picture that. The sword shrank into a stone, and I could re-attach it to the necklace.”
  • Valkyries can fly, camouflage magically, and teleport back to Valhalla in a poof of light.

Spiritual Content

  • Norse gods are real, but they are not worshipped. They are treated more like characters than all-knowing deities.
  • Magnus describes the place where his funeral occurs. “It was set up like a chapel: three stained glass windows on the back wall, rows of folding chairs facing an open coffin on a dais. I hated this already. I’d been raised non-religious. I’d always considered myself an atheist.”
  • Magnus says, “If there is an Almighty God up there, a head honcho of the universe, He was totally laughing at me right now.”
  • Samirah is Muslim and wears a hijab. When arguing with Magnus she says, “A good Muslim girl is not supposed to hang out on her own with strange guys.”
  • Thor is described as watching television religiously. Then Magnus says, “Can I say a god did something religiously?”

by Morgan Filgas

Team BFF: Race to the Finish!

Sophia and her friends are BFFs. Together they work on coding projects, eat cookies, and have impromptu dance parties. They are excited to participate in their first robot hackathon, where they hope to show off their coding skills. But when Sophia’s parents need her to babysit instead of attending the hackathon, everything may change. Without Sophia, the team will be disqualified. When Sofia tells her friends, will they have her back or will it destroy their friendship?

The second installment of the Girls Who Code Series focuses on Sophia’s struggle with balancing home responsibilities with her coding club responsibilities. Readers will be able to relate to Sophia’s struggle to tell her friends bad news—she won’t be able to participate in the hackathon. The friends in the story not only brainstorm how to build a robot, they also show the importance of helping each other. The diverse cast of characters are young girls who have a variety of interests (cooking, drama, and fashion), but come together because of their love of coding.

Team BFF, Race to the Finish is told from Sophia’s point of view, which allows the reader to understand Sophia’s feelings of not being noticed by her family. The reader will get a small glimpse into the life of a large, Hispanic family. Sophia’s family not only makes traditional Spanish food but also uses Spanish in their everyday interactions.

Sophia is also struggling to understand her feelings for a boy. She has a crush, but is tongue-tied every time she sees the boy. As Sophia and the boy interact, she wonders how to navigate a boy-girl relationship. Team BFF, Race to the Finish is an easy-to-read story that shows smart girls in everyday situations. Sophia’s struggle is an interesting story that is highly relatable and will capture many readers’ interest.

Sexual Content

  • Sophia has a crush on a boy and when they talk, Sophia talked even though “butterflies in my stomach were zooming around like crazy. . . It was silly to feel weird around him.”
  • While walking with Sophia, Sammy “reached for my hand. I let him take it, even though it was a sweaty mess—but his was too.”

Violence

  • None

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

 

 

The Basque Dragon

As members of the Unicorn Rescue Society, Elliot and Uchenna know that mythical creatures exist. But Elliot’s unprepared for the strange events he encounters. As he leaves for school, Elliot finds a mysterious package on his front step. He opens the package and finds a book called The Country of Basque. When Elliot gets to school, he meets up with Uchenna. Professor Fauna approaches them—he needs their help.

Soon, the two friends are whisked away in Professor Fauna’s plane and heading across the ocean to the mountains of the Basque Country. The members of the Unicorn Rescue Society must find and save a missing dragon. Can the group track down the kidnapped dragon? And if they find the dragon, how will they stay alive long enough to save it?

An action-packed fantasy, The Basque Dragon is full of adventure, mystery, and humor. Elliot and Uchenna show how two people who are completely different can still be friends. Elliot would rather read about mythical animals than meet them. His fearful nature is a fun contrast to Uchenna’s adventurous, courageous spirit. Uchenna is not portrayed as a stereotypical girl; she is capable, strong, and smart.

The Basque Dragon gives some history of the Basque people and uses some Basque words. The story explains how to pronounce the Basque language by giving pronunciation guides. For example, the Basque people are called, the Euskaldunak—AY-oo-SKAL-doo-nak.

In order to enjoy the story, readers will have to suspend their disbelief. There are several events that are unrealistic. For example, the professor parks his beat-up single-prop plane in the school parking lot. The group flies across the Atlantic in the beat-up plane, which the professor does not know how to land. Despite the professor’s lack of skills, the group still makes it safely to the desired location. Another unrealistic event is that even though the group leaves New Jersey after school, Elliot and Uchenna are still able to make it home in time for dinner.

One disturbing aspect of the story is that Elliot and Uchenna go to Europe with Professor Fauna, even though they don’t trust him. To make matters worse, they lie to their parents and say they were at school participating in a club—the Worm Nutrition Club.

The second installment of The Unicorn Rescue Society can be read as a stand-alone book; however, readers will enjoy the book more if they read The Creature of the Pines first. The Basque Dragon will keep younger readers entertained with its rapid pace, humorous tone, and diverse characters. Black-and-white illustrations are scattered throughout the book; the illustrations add humor as well as help readers visualize the characters. Most of the text is easy to read because it uses short paragraphs, simple vocabulary, and dialogue. However, adding the Basque language makes reading parts of the story laborious. Even though the evil villain is predictable and some of the events are unrealistic, The Basque Dragon will entertain readers while exploring the difference between independence and isolation.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • When the group lands in Basque, someone shoots at them. “Pop! Pop! Pop. . . They threw themselves to the ground.” The shooting stops when the professor stands up and says, “You have succeeded, whoever you are! We are afraid!”
  • The kids are told an old story. A dragon killed a knight and captured a noblewoman. When the Knight’s squire tells the swordsmith that the blade he made broke, the swordsmith goes to free the woman. When the swordsmith finds the dragon, “A roar of flame enveloped Teodosio. He fell to the ground, fire covering his body. . .” The swordsmith and the noblewoman are able to escape.
  • During World War II, Nazis dropped bombs on the dragon. “. . . Another wave of bombs fell. The ground trembled. The great herensuge fell to the ground.” A man led the dragon to a safe cave.
  • In a fit of anger, Professor Fauna smashes the plastic membership cards for The Unicorn Rescue Society. Professor Fauna “brought the rock down again and again, breaking the plastic cards to pieces, not seeming to notice that he was also smashing the buttons and switches. Dials started going crazy, whirring and spinning. . . A groaning came from the walls of the cavern and then the sound of an explosion. . .” The cave begins to crash around the group, but no one is injured.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • One of the characters says “darn it.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • In the Basque Country, there are stories of a “dragon with seven heads: Sugaar, the god of the storms.”
  • A dragon’s saliva is “marvelously powerful” and will heal wounds.

 

 

 

 

Dragons in a Bag

Jaxon’s mom leaves the nine-year-old with Ma, so she can look after him. While there, Jax is intrigued by a moving package. Ma reveals that she is a witch, and she has the duty to deliver three baby dragons to a parallel realm where magic still exists. Jax joins Ma on her journey, but when the transporter takes them to the Mesozoic era, Ma quickly sends Jax and the dragons back to Brooklyn. Jax is determined to keep the dragons safe until he can find Ma. Will Jax be able to protect the dragons and find Ma in another dimension?

Dragon in a Bag contains a cast of diverse characters, including an invisible man, a witch, a squirrel, and Jax’s friend from school. Black-and-white illustrations are scattered throughout the book and help the reader visualize the characters. When Jax is sent back to Brooklyn, he is forced to ask for help from adults who are strangers. Even though the adults in the story make some life decisions that others do not agree with, the adults’ decisions are not criticized or shown in a negative light.

The children in the story are able to share their knowledge about different subjects, and Jax clearly loves geography. The story teaches about animal imprinting and information about the Mesozoic era. Jax briefly enters the Mesozoic era; however, Jax’s visit is so short that the reader will be disappointed with the lack of dinosaur action.

Much of the story focuses on the interpersonal relationships between the adults; they all have different views of magic and what should be done with the dragons. This allows the reader to see different people’s perspectives and shows how people can have different views without being wrong. Even though the dragons are a main part of the plot, they stay in Ma’s purse for the majority of the story. Readers who pick up the story with the hopes of seeing some dragon action will be disappointed. In the end, Dragons in a Bag is an interesting story, but younger readers will struggle to stay engaged because the story lacks action.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • A squirrel comes into the house and Ma hits it with a cane. The squirrel “jumps out of the way just in time, and Ma’s cane crashes the metal breadbox instead.”
  • When a dinosaur attacks Ma, she “grabbed hold of that funny flap and swung around onto its back. Of course, that was after I’d zapped it a couple of times with my cane . . . then I used a mild enchantment to make it more manageable.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Ma serves Jax a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and then asks, “You need a beer to wash that down. Why don’t you grab a bottle from the fridge?” Later Jax realizes she was talking about root beer.

Language

  • Ma tells Jax, “go sit your butt down on that sofa and read your darn book.”

Supernatural

  • Ma is a witch, who has three dragons she is supposed to take to another dimension where magic exists. She tells Jax, “Parallel realms exist in different dimensions. Time travel is like whizzing down a slide. Crossing dimensions is more like skipping double Dutch.”
  • A transporter reads a person’s intentions and sends them to a different time period or dimension. Ma and Jax travel to the time of dinosaurs and then to a dimension where there are supercontinents.
  • One of the characters can breathe fire.

Spiritual Content

  • None

 

The Creature of the Pines

Elliot isn’t excited about starting a new school three weeks after the school year began. To make matters worse, his class is going on a field trip to the Pine Barrens, a potentially dangerous, creepy forest. The field trip is being led by Professor Fauna, a strange man who is rumored to be unhinged from reality.

Uchenna is the only person who will talk to Elliot. Unlike Elliot, she is adventurous and fearless. When Uchenna goes into the forbidden forest, will Elliot be brave enough to follow? When the two meet a Creature of the Pines, will the two survive?

Right from the start, Elliot and the other characters jump off the pages. The frightening Professor Fauna adds mystery, possible danger, and suspense. The diverse, interesting characters will pull the reader into this fast-paced mystery. The vivid descriptions and well-developed characters join together to create a suspenseful mystery that readers will not want to put down. Elliot, a fearful boy who has the tendency to overthink situations and Uchenna, an adventurous, fearless girl, make a fun pair as they join together to help a Jersey Devil that they find in the woods.

The Creature of the Pines has adventure, danger, and a mythical creature with magical powers. Black-and-white illustrations are scattered throughout the book; the illustrations add humor as well as help readers visualize the characters. The text is easy to read because it uses short paragraphs, simple vocabulary, and dialogue. Although the creature makes an exciting appearance, more information about the interesting creature could have been incorporated into the story. The Creature of the Pines will delight readers who are interested in a character-driven adventure.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • While trying to find the Jersey Devil, Elliot and Uchenna go into someone’s greenhouse. “Phipps, the butler, had crept around them, and at that instant, he grabbed Elliot’s arms.” The Jersey Devil jumps onto the butler’s face and Uchenna “spun and punched Phipps in the stomach. She was only a kid, so she couldn’t punch very hard. But she did double Phipps over.” The kids are able to escape.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • One of the characters said, “You’re darn right!”

Supernatural

  • According to a family’s legend, Beulah (a distant relative) had twelve children. After she delivered child number twelve, she told someone, “I won’t be having any more children. I’d rather have the devil than have another child.” When she gave birth to the next child, the “baby wasn’t a baby at all. It was a strange creature, and it went screeching out of Beulah’s arms and straight through the window, leaving shattered glass all over. . . Ever since then, the Jersey Devil roams these pines.”

Spiritual Content

  • None

Outward Blonde

Sixteen-year-old Lizzie wants to forget the father who abandoned her and the mother who lives in a drug-induced fog. She spends her time shopping and partying with her best friend. One of Lizzie’s drunken escapades is caught on camera, and her bad behavior is shared with gossip sites.

Lizzie’s mother wants to make sure Lizzie doesn’t cause the family any more scandal, while her father wants her to get help. So in the middle of the night, two strangers whisk her away to Camp Smiley, a gritty wilderness survival program for troubled teens. Lizzie’s only goal is to escape. She doesn’t think she has anything in common with the other teen campers, and she has no desire to deal with her own demons. Will Lizzie escape back into her party life or will Camp Smiley be able to turn around this troubled teen?

Portrayed as a typical rich girl, Lizzie believes money can get her out of any situation. Lizzie’s only life goal is to shop and party. This spoiled, snotty rich girl spends much of her time whining—about her parents, the campers, the conditions of the camp, and everything in between. Even though Lizzie is portrayed as a wild, boy-crazy girl at the beginning of the book, Lizzie later gets upset that others think she is sexually active when she is still a virgin. The inconsistencies in Lizzie’s character are one reason Lizzie is a difficult character to care about.

Other characters are difficult to connect with as well. The camp staff is stereotypical; such as the ex-military camp director, who doesn’t think Lizzie can complete the program. Lizzie’s parents are also portrayed in an unrealistic, stereotypical manner. At one point, Lizzie’s dad says “and rather than allowing you to fall into the depths of despair, we’re sending you to a place where you can reconnect with the light inside you and find greater meaning in life.”

Although there are some funny scenes, much of the plot seems unrealistic. For example, when Lizzie and the other campers run away, a random stranger picks them up, takes them to his store to exchange their camp uniforms for clothes, and drives them to Vegas. Ultimately, too much time in this book is focused on Lizzie’s escape plan and partying, and not enough time is spent on her dealing with her issues.

The diverse cast of characters deals with some serious issues, including understanding one’s sexuality, gambling, bullying, and addiction. Outward Blonde has a lighthearted tone and shows readers the importance of forgiveness, accepting yourself, and helping others.

Sexual Content

  • When Lizzie goes on a Tinder date, her friend tells Lizzie the man might kill her, and if she was murdered, her friend would tell others “What I miss most about my BFF Lizzie Finklestein is sneaking out with her on school nights, using our never-fail fakes to get into all the best bars, doing body shots until we puke, and making out with random college guys who have no idea we’re still in high school.”
  • Lizzie sends a man a picture of herself highlighting her cleavage. When her friend won’t go to the bar with her to meet him, Lizzie says “I think you’re missing out. Because I’m pretty sure James Franco would be up for a threesome. Just think of the picture we’d get pretending we were going to go through with it—“
  • Lizzie meets a 25 year-old-man at the bar. While on the dance floor, “I turn around, grab his cheeks, and kiss him. He’s not half bad.” She later leaves the bar with him.
  • A boy nods toward a girl and says “I’d like to work her hole.”
  • When the group gets to camp, they are told “there is no inappropriate physical contact amongst anyone, whether of the opposite sex or same sex.” One of the teenagers asks “Can you define inappropriate? . . . And also if there are certain acts that are still considered appropriate? Like, maybe, blow jobs are out but hand jobs are okay?”
  • Lizzie thinks the camp counselors “want to roll their eyes and complain about what a big pain in the ass she is. And then jump each other’s bones.”
  • When a camper gets upset, a boy says “I’d tell you to calm your tits, but I just realized maybe glass blowing reminds you of why you ended up here. . . You know, using your God-given talents for evil instead of good. Blowing people.”
  • Lizzie wants to run away, but she doesn’t want to go alone. So she sneaks into a boy’s tent. When a counselor is outside the tent, Lizzie hides in the boy’s sleeping bag. The boy “grabs my hand, and puts it on his bulge. I snatch it back and punch him in the balls. He grunts.”
  • Later the boy apologizes and then his “lips graze mine. I’m still mad but I can’t resist; it’s an expert-level kiss. Just enough tongue. A nibble here and there. He licks my earlobe. I nuzzle his neck. He presses himself closer.” When he asks if Lizzie “wants to do it,” she gets angry and leaves.
  • One of the campers guesses that a girl is at camp because she is obsessed with “masturbating.” When the girl denies it, the camper says “Why not? I mean, who knows better than you what you like and how you like it?”
  • A camper is nervous about showering in front of others, but another girl thinks she is afraid to shower with a lesbian. She yells “Just because I’ve dated a lot of girls doesn’t mean I see every single person on Earth with a vagina as a potential partner, so it’s not your concern. . . You are not even close to being my type. For one, I dig blondes. Two your butt. Three, your tits. Not big enough.”
  • Lizzie threatens to “call your parents pretending to be the gyno and tell them your yeast infection is actually gonorrhea you got from banging all the guys at camp.”
  • While in Vegas, Lizzie, and Ari schedule “private time.” Lizzie goes into the bathroom to freshen up. When she comes out “Jem is on the bed. With Ari. They are intertwined. A tangle of tongues and hands and body parts.” Jem apologizes. Ari says “Hey, no need to fight over me, girls. There’s more than enough to go around.”
  • Jack and Lizzie kiss three times. One time, Lizzie leans down and “kisses the top of his head. . . and I kiss both his eyelids. And then I lay the softest one ever on his lips. . .”
  • When Lizzie was in elementary school she took a book to class for a book report, but she didn’t know what it was until she opened it in class. “. . . It turned out to be the Kama Sutra, which is like an illustrated Indian sex guide. So I basically taught my third grade class how to get laid. All because I didn’t actually read a book. . . “
  • One of the campers took “a picture of the nerdiest kid ever jerking off in the bathroom stall at school and sent it to his lax bros.” That kid tries to commit suicide because of the picture.

Violence

  • One of the girls is at camp because “the GUY I banged couldn’t stop bragging about it to the entire school. So I scratched fuckboy into his car and took a bat to his taillights.”
  • Lizzie and Sam plan to run away. Another camper hears them and threatens to tell. Sam “clamps a hand over her lips. . . Chandra peels Sam’s hand away. And then bites her.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Lizzie’s mom is addicted to drugs. Lizzie doesn’t mind because the “anxiety disorder that required daily doses of Klonopin x Ambien = me being able to do whatever with whoever I want to, whenever I want to.”
  • When Lizzie’s mom comes to check on her, “her eyes are glassy and she’s a bit wobbly—both sure signs the medicine is already taking effect.”
  • Lizzie goes to a bar and drinks enough vodka clubs that “everything’s funny. Not to mention fuzzy. And fun.”
  • A group runs away from camp and goes to Vegas. While there, they drink Miami vices.

Language

  • Profanity is used often. Profanity includes ass, asshole, bitch, bullshit, crap, damn, dick, fatass, fuck, motherfucking, shit, smartass, and WTF.
  • “Oh my God” and “OMG” are used as exclamations.
  • Lizzie’s dog likes to eat bull sticks. Lizzie thinks, “Whoever decided dried bull dick might be a good dog snack is a certified psycho. . . “ Later, Lizzie refers to the dog treat as “bull penis.”
  • When a police officer pulls over a car that Lizzie is a passenger in, she is “appalled at my extreme-level dumb-assery.”
  • After a police dashcam video is released of Lizzie’s bad behavior, she is dubbed “the Rich Bitch Billionairess.”
  • The director of the camp tells Lizzie, “I can’t wait to see your spoiled candy ass trying to make it through the solo overnight trip you’ll have to complete to graduate.”
  • Lizzie calls a boy a “jerk.”
  • A boy calls someone a “fag” and says, “I had you pegged for a dyke.”
  • A boy says his “balls are so chafed, I’m going to be walking like I fucked a horse today.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • After a police dashcam video is released, Lizzie is “shaking and praying—to who or what I don’t know—that it won’t hurt too much when they [her parents] kill me.”
  • When someone suggests that Lizzie pray, she responds, “I’m not really the praying type.”
  • The counselor says “Mother Earth, today another group of beautiful young people with unlimited potential joined us on our journey . . . Allow us to light their way back to happiness, to anoint them with love and laughter, to help them manifest their true and perfect selves.”

Boy Bites Bug

Will wasn’t trying to prove a point. He wasn’t trying to put his friend in his place. He just wanted to fix an awkward situation. So, he ate a stink bug. Now, everyone knows him as bug boy. His new popularity brings a host of confusion—he’s feuding with his old best friend and trying to navigate a new friendship. Will wants to do what’s right, but he’s not always sure what that is.

Boy Bites Bug is a fast-paced story that brings the struggles of friendship into focus. The diverse characters are authentic, funny, and bring heart to the story. Will has a hard time figuring out how to deal with his changing friendship with Darryl. Will thinks, “Darryl and he had been friends for a long time, but would a real friend make him feel crappy for trying to be a decent person?”

As Will and Elroy become friends, Will struggles with figuring out what racism is. Even though his new friend Elroy is from Minnesota, others see him only as a Mexican, and Will makes assumptions about Elroy because of his race. Will knows it’s wrong to give someone “crap about who he was,” but wonders if his own behavior and assumptions are racist as well.

The story shows strong positive relationships between Will and his family. Even though Will’s actions have negative consequences for his sister, his sister still stands by his side. Will’s sister is one of the best parts of the book because even though her bug-eating brother causes her problems, in the end, she supports him and even makes up a bug-eating cheer for him.

Boy Bites Bug will appeal to a variety of readers because Will and his friends struggle with real-life issues—friendship, family, and figuring out life. Through Will’s journey, the reader will learn about eating bugs “on purpose” as well as get recipes that include bugs. The gross factor brings humor as well as lessons about different cultures. In the end, Will realizes that making fun of people for eating bugs isn’t funny. He also learns an important lesson about forgiveness. He learns that “some apologies would never fix things, but that didn’t mean they shouldn’t be made. It just meant they’d be harder to get out.”

Sexual Content

  • One of Will’s friends uses his father’s credit card for ridiculous items because, “his dad left Simon’s mom and taken off to Arizona with a girlfriend, leaving Simon behind with a credit card to make up for not calling much or ever visiting.”

Violence

  • Hollie accidentally gives a boy a bloody nose. “Hollie had been putting something on the top shelf of her locker when Jeremy sneaked up behind her and brushed her back. . . He’d surprised her, and when she jerked around, her elbow cracked his nose.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • During a presentation, Will talks about how many bugs can legally be in food. He said, “If one’s dad had a bear with it (pizza), he would drink twenty-five hundred aphids, too.”

Language

  • Light profanity is used throughout the story. Profanity includes crap, holy crap, holy cow, and heck.
  • Will’s sister said someone is “acting like a jerk.” She also calls her brother a “dork-face” and a “fuzz-butt.”
  • A boy calls the new boy a “cholo.” The boy “knew he’d crossed a line, but his jaw squared too-he wasn’t taking anything back.”
  • The kids in the book call each other names including bonehead, dork, jerk, loser, nerd, idiot and menso (stupid).
  • Will gets upset because his friend is making “the three of them look like prejudiced jerks.”
  • “Oh my gosh” is used as an exclamation.
  • At wrestling practice, Will changes quickly because he didn’t want “his bony butt hanging out in front of these guys any longer than necessary.”
  • Will said his father can cook, “but you only eat his chili if you want to shoot flames out of your butt.”
  • When Will is introducing someone to the sport of wrestling, he said, “If you think it’s gay, you should leave now.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

 

 

 

 

Spotlight on Coding Club!

Erin loves being on stage. When the school announces an upcoming talent show, Erin knows she can come up with a winning performance. Erin also agrees to help the coding club with developing an app to help score the contestants. Erin knows she’s taking on a lot, but she’s determined to distract herself. Erin doesn’t want to think about her father’s deployment and staying busy is her solution.

With operation distraction in full force, Erin’s anxiety gets the best of her. She wants to pretend that everything is okay, but her stress levels keep increasing. Her friends from the coding club have always been there for her, but Erin doesn’t want to tell them what’s really going on in her life. Will Erin be able to handle the pressure? If she tells her friends the truth, will they still like her?

The fourth installment of the Girls Who Code series has the same lovable characters but is told from Erin’s point of view, which allows the story to focus on a new conflict. Readers will get a look at Erin’s thought process as she tries to use humor to diffuse stressful situations. Erin tries to hide her true feelings from her friends. Readers will relate to Erin’s struggle with anxiety and her fear of telling others. The story makes it clear that having anxiety should not be viewed as an embarrassment. Erin is told, “I think it’s really cool that you talked to a therapist about this. Getting professional help was definitely the mature way to handle it.”

Spotlight on Coding Club uses texting bubbles, emojis, and simple vocabulary, which makes the story easy to read and assessable to younger readers. The fourth book in the series focuses less on the girls’ friendship and more on Erin’s personal struggle. Although Erin’s struggle is real, the story contains less action than previous books. Along with Erin’s personal struggle, Maya struggles with asking a girl on a date. Although dating is a topic many preteens are interested in, Maya’s romantic interests seemed forced and added little to the plot. In the end, Spotlight on Coding Club teaches a valuable lesson about friendship and anxiety but lacks action and suspense.

Sexual Content

  • There is a short conversation about Maya asking another girl out on a date. Later in the story, Maya asks the girl to the movies and it is “definitely a date.”

Violence

  • None

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • “Oh my god” is used as an exclamation three times.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

Rosie Revere and The Raucous Riveters

Rosie Revere loves engineering. When Rosie’s Aunt Rose and her friends—a group of women who built airplanes during World War II—ask her to complete an important project, Rosie is excited to help. One of the Riveters has broken both her wrists and can’t participate in the Art-A-Go contest. Rosie and her friends use all of their knowledge to invent a tool to help her paint. Building a paintapolooza comes with setbacks. When Rosie begins to lose hope, her friends step in to help. Will Rosie and her friends be able to finish the paintapolooza in time for the big event?

Readers will initially be drawn to Rosie Revere and the Raucous Riveters because of the cheerful illustrations but will continue reading because of Rosie’s personality. Rosie is a strong character who uses problem solving to create her inventions. Rosie’s struggle is realistic; she doesn’t find the solution to her problem without failure. When Rosie feels “frustrated and frazzled,” she uses smart strategies to refocus. For example, Rosie’s great imagination causes her to focus on what-ifs, and “when that happened, Rosie had to remind herself to stop and think differently.”

Rosie’s illustration notebook, which contains lists and alliterations, will engage readers transitioning to chapter books. Rosie and her friends use imagination and teamwork to help someone in need. The story portrays the older generation in a positive light, and through her interactions with the Riveters, Rosie learns the importance of strong friendships. The story’s positive message is clear: “The only true failure can come if you quit.”

After the story concludes, additional text is included: a poem about a valve, information on valves, and historical information about the Riveters. The book ends with a “think about this” section that guides readers to apply the story to their life.

Instead of focusing on a simple plot, the book delves into too many characters and too many subplots. For instance, Rosie misinterprets one character’s behavior, but later discovers that the person was allergic to sunlight. Although there is historical information about the Blue River Riveters, the facts do more to complicate the story. For beginning readers interested in engineering, readers may want to begin with the Ellie, Engineer series before moving to The Questioneers series.

Sexual Content
• None

Violence
• None

Drugs and Alcohol
• None

Language
• None

Supernatural
• None

Spiritual Content
• None

80 Days or Die

Jules Verne’s left behind an unpublished manuscript, The Lost Treasure. When Max and his cousin, Alex, follow the clues and end up rich, they think all of their problems are solved. But when Max’s friend becomes gravely ill and Max’s mother’s illness returns, Max and his cousin take a deeper look into Verne’s history.

They discover that Verne miraculously recovered from a near-fatal gunshot wound. The Lost Treasure hints that Verne discovered magical healing elements that allowed him to recover from his wounds. Using clues from Around the World in 80 days, Max and Alex set out on a daring adventure to learn more of Verne’s secrets and heal Max’s mom and friend.

80 Days or Die begins with fun riddles that readers will enjoy trying to figure out. When Max and Alex head out on their journey, they meet several new people who they bring on their trip. Although Max seems fascinated by facts, he doesn’t take the time to do any research on the people who travel with him. Can these new friends be trusted? The question adds to the suspense, but the blind faith in random strangers doesn’t ring true.

Like the first installment of the Max Tilt series, 80 Days or Die jumps from location to location in a rush against time. Younger readers will enjoy seeing a fascinating underground cavern, strange wolf people, the icy Antarctica and a glimpse of the desert. Several times throughout the story, Max and Alex just happen to run into the perfect person to assist them. Although the additional characters were needed to advance the plot, their appearance and willingness to help is unrealistic.

Lerangis writes a solid adventure, sprinkled with surprises and interesting landscapes. However, having a cast of untrustworthy supporting characters made the story less fun. After all of the hardships Max and Alex endured in Fire the Depths, their trusting nature seemed misplaced. Max and Alex’s blind trust in other people will bother some readers, especially when one of the characters they trust ruins a perfectly happy ending.

Sexual Content

  • When looking for someone, Max and his friend “stopped at a booth where a couple in matching black leather jackets were in the middle of a long kiss.”

Violence

  • When Max takes an object, the natives threw a rock at a man in the group. “With a soft thud, the rock hit the back of Sergei’s head, and he dropped to the ground. The wolf people were surrounding him now. . . With a leap, he decked one of the wolf people with a solid martial-arts kick to the jaw. . . The wolf people backed away.” During the fight, a kid is pushed into a hole, where her arm is injured.
  • Max and another man race toward a house. They jump on yaks, but when Max pulls ahead, Nigel grabs him. Max “hit the ground hard, the pain shot up his spine . . . The pain came in waves.” Later, someone causes a yak to collide into Nigel and the man falls, and “he moaned, writhing in agony.”
  • A woman holds a gun on Max and is friends. There is a struggle for the gun, and the woman falls into a crevice. Max also falls into the crevice. “He was panting. Sweating. Achy.” His friends save him and help the woman.
  • Two people are arguing when a man with a gun approaches. Max jumps at the man, “With a cry, they both fell to the ground. The gun flew out of the man’s hand and slid off.” After a short scuffle, the man “Lifted Max off the ground. Mag struggled against the man’s grip, but his fists were like stone.” Someone helps Max by hitting the man on the head, and the attacker “fell to the ground, limp.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • In a moment of excitement, a character says, “Good God, what is it?”
  • Someone says, “I’ll be darned.”
  • One of the characters asks Max if “Plan B stands for ‘boneheaded’?”
  • “Oh dear Lord” is used as an exclamation once.

Supernatural

  • Wolf people watch over coils. The coils “fell from the sky one day, like holy rain. They do things—make people sick, punish for bad hunting season . . . the usual local superstitions.” The coils changed the people, making them look like wolf people. The people believe the coils are sacred and “they must protect holy coils from intruders.”

Spiritual Content

  • Max, who likes facts, said, “God is in the factoids.”

 

Fire the Depths

Thirteen-year-old Max Tilt’s life changes in a moment. When his mother becomes ill, his cousin Alex comes to care for him. When Max discovers his parents are in danger of losing their home, Alex and Max want to find a way to help. They head to the attic to find items to sell and discover Max’s great-great-great-grandfather Jules Verne’s unfinished manuscript The Lost Treasures. What begins as a quest for artic items becomes a treasure hunt as Alex and Max learn that everything Jules Verne wrote in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea was true.

As Alex and Max begin their journey, a strange skunk-haired man named Spencer Niemand appears. He’s determined to steal The Lost Treasures’ manuscript and claim the treasure as his own. However, he needs the kids’ help. Can Max and Alex outwit the devious man who is willing to use violence to gain the treasure?

There is a lot to like in Max Tilt: Fire the Depths. Right from the start, the story is fast-paced and interesting. Although the story is a bit far-fetched, especially the part where his parents leave knowing the electricity will be turned off and the house repossessed, these events explain why Max and Alex are willing to go on a dangerous treasure hunt in order to help.

As the two cousins begin their journey, they don’t realize the danger that follows. As the two follow Jules Verne’s path, they use clues he left behind, but they are soon trapped in a submarine with a villain. As they struggle against an evil villain, they dive to a city beneath the ocean, explore an ice cave in Greenland, and fight a giant squid. This page-turner keeps readers engaged using suspense, adventure, and a bit of humor.

The interplay between Alex and Max helps readers engage in the story. Throughout the story, the two cousins build a friendship and learn to rely on each other in dire situations. Each shows their bravery in different ways. Alex is unique in that he has synesthesia (where one sense substitutes for another) and the effects of synesthesia are shown in a simple, unique way.

Although this adventurous story is written for the ages of eight and up, the story is more appropriate for middle school students because of the violence and the truly evil villain. Although the violence is not described in graphic detail, the villain kills others in order to satisfy his greed. The action-packed plot takes Max and Alex on a submarine ride to an epic adventure that will engage students and teach that, “Sometimes you can’t be ready to do the things you really need to do. You just do them. And that makes you ready.”

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • When a man grabs Niemand’s wrist, Niemand, “drew a knife from his pocket, and slammed it downward. As the man yanked his hand back, the blade sank into the tabletop.”
  • In order to eliminate witnesses, Niemand locks people into a warehouse and then sets off explosives. Niemand tells the event from his point of view, “on four, he heard sudden shouting and frantic footsteps inside the building. They finally realized. Good. Let them know there was no escape . . . On seven, the warehouse exploded.”
  • Niemand throws hot coffee in someone’s face. The man, “was squirming in pain on the worship floor.”
  • When bullies steal Max’s lunch, he uses a drone to get his lunch back. The drone hovers over the bullies’ heads and Max hits the release button. “The apple conked Dugan in the head. As he screamed and jumped aside, Max guided Vulturon downward, where Claw #3 grabbed onto his lunch bag.”
  • When a bad man tries to grab Alex, she hits him. The man, “recoiled with a howl of pain. But his reflexes were quick enough to wrap one beefy hand around Max’s throat.” Someone grabs the man’s foot and he lost his balance, “falling to the floor. His head smacked against the solid-steel edge of the Tilts’ coffee table.”
  • A man shoots at Alex and Max, but someone stops him before anyone is hurt.
  • In a letter, Verne writes about how Captain No One destroys an underwater civilization. “With a flash of fire, the carapace was breached. A hole shattered the thick material, jagged and mean as a lightning bolt. An explosion turned the sea to red.” Captain No One looted the city, and when two crew members tried to steal, they “were shot for their greed.”
  • A man falls from an icy ledge, “and then came the scream—deep, raw, animal-like—as Basile fell off the ledge and into the teeming white mass below.” Later, he is discovered alive.
  • Niemand ties Alex and Max to a snowmobile. “He circled it around each of them individually. He tied it down to various places on the snowmobile . . . Niemand flipped the lever to Drive. And he walked away.” The kids then fall into the frozen ocean, but they do not die. When the squid grabs Alex, Basile “swung the ax at the appendage that held Alex . . . The blade split it in two, the top part skirting upward in a violent spray of milky liquid.” The squid finally retreats.
  • A giant squid attacks the submarine and is able to get inside. Basile, Alex, and Max fight the squid in a battle that lasts eight pages.
  • When Niemand tries to capture Alex and Max, Max fights back. “As André approached, Max thrust himself off with his hands and kicked upwards, landing a solid hit on André’s chin. The scraggle-haired man fell backwards, arms flailing.” André grabs Alex and tosses her “like a bale of hay. Max saw her body fly over a thick copse and smack against a tree trunk. He heard her head thump and saw her limp body drop down to the forest floor.”
  • Niemand tells Alex to dig his own grave, but before he can get the work done, Alex hits Niemand on the head with a shovel. The kids are able to get away.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • “Crap!” is used once.
  • Max tells someone that they are about to feel like “asses.”
  • Someone yells at a bad driver, “Watch where you’re going, idiot!”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • While hiking, a character thinks “if God had meant for humans to live among hills, he would have made them goats.”
  • After defeating the squid, Alex said, “Thank God it’s over.”

Polaris

During the 1830s, the Polaris sets sail on a scientific mission to the Amazon jungle. The crew is excited to bring back new discoveries, but when the landing party returns, only half are alive. After an argument, the crew loads a chest into the bowels of the ship. After they begin their trip home, a bloody mutiny leaves most of the adult crew dead. Those who live, flee the ship, leaving six children—none of whom are older than twelve. The captain’s 12-year-old nephew Owen, a botanist’s assistant, and other deckhands struggle for survival. Soon they realize that the sea isn’t their only worry. Something else is lurking below deck, and it’s growing.

From the first page, Polaris will capture reader’s attention and they will not want to put the book down. With just the right mix of suspense and action, Polaris makes the fight for survival come to life. Full of realistic detail and nautical facts, readers will be pulled into the frightening atmosphere of Polaris. The story is appropriate for younger readers with tame battle scenes. This fast-paced story has well-developed characters that show the importance of working together despite the fact that they do not like each other. With a diverse cast of characters, an engaging plotline, and an epic battle scene, Polaris will not disappoint those looking for an excellent horror story. But be warned, the creepy creature may make its way into the nightmares of readers.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • A character thinks about a boy, who “had blown up trying to carry two cartridges (of gun powder) at once.”
  • A mutiny begins among the adult crew. The children listen to the fighting through a locked door and hear gunshots as well as someone being thrown into the sea. Then the boys hear, “three shots rang out in quick succession—the officer’s pistols. Shrieks of pain mixed with the shouts of rage, telling Owen that the rest of the work would be done with blades and hands.”
  • Owen shoots the creature. “Owen heard a quick sound behind him—tik-taclik! —like metal on bone.” Then, the boys pour boiling water on him. When the creature flees, someone stabs it with a spear.
  • When the creature snatches one of the boys, someone shoots the creature. “Per-KRACK went the pistol. A flash of flame and a billowing plume of smoke shot forth.”
  • A boy hits Owen over the head with a hatchet. Owen is not seriously injured.
  • When the creature tries to snatch another person, there is a fight that takes place over several pages. When someone shoots it, “the lead ball ricocheted off the thick armor plating of its thorax.” When Owen throws the pistol at it, “the butt of the pistol smacked heavily into what had been Obed’s forehead. The creature staggered backwards. . .” No one is injured.
  • The creature attacks the boys. The battle takes place over several chapters. During the battle, “A dark red rat-like creature emerged from the hatch, then a second, and then they all began to pour out. One dozen, two dozen.” The kids rig a device to blow up the ship after they have jumped off.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Owen thinks about his uncle and father. “His uncle had taken him in after his mother’s death and his father’s descent into sorrow—and the bottle.”

Language

  • When the crewmembers discuss being infected with spores, someone thinks, “Oh God. . . What if it’s me?”

Supernatural

  • The children believe the ghost of Obed Macy is haunting the lower deck of the ship. They discuss if a Bible and cross will ward off the ghost.

Spiritual Content

  • During a storm, a character begins “the Lord’s prayer.”
  • A character prays, “Lord help us all.”

 

Not So Normal Norbert: L4LUZR—1

Everything is the same. Being different is illegal. His All-Knowing Eternal Excellency, Loving Leader, has decided that “Conformity makes us Free.” Individuality is evil. All Earth must conform. When Norbert makes a funny impersonation of Loving Leader at school, the truth police arrest him. Being funny is illegal.

Norbert and two others are banished to the Astro-Nuts Camp on planet Zorquat 3. Now that Norbert is on a planet where rule-breakers are sent, the only things he wants is to be sent back to Earth. Norbert is on a quest to prove that he’s not creative. Will Norbert be stuck on a planet where everyone seems crazy creative or will he find a way to return to Earth?

The cover of Not So Normal Norbert will catch readers’ attention, and the first chapter will instantly captivate. Short chapters and funny black-and-white illustrations make the story easy to read. The descriptions include a healthy dose of onomatopoeias, which helps create the fun atmosphere of Zorquat 3. Told from Norbert’s point of view, the lives of those on Zorquat 3 jump off the page.

The main theme throughout the book is the importance of being an individual and being different. Everyone on Zorquat 3 embraces the message (except Norbert), which leads to some ridiculous and outlandish behavior by both the children and the adults. The crazy behavior adds interest to the story; however, part of the story drags because too many events do not connect to the main plot.

Anyone who feels different and odd will be able to relate to Norbert’s fears. The message of embracing being different is clear, but repeated a little too often. Norbert learns the hazards of obsessing over what if’s. One of the adults tells him, “don’t focus on what if’s or you will completely freak yourself out . . . Stick with what is.” The story also teaches that just because someone acts like a “jerk,” you don’t need to act the same way. For readers who are looking for a silly, humorous book, Norbert will make a good addition to their reading library.

Sexual Content

  • Norbert’s crush kisses him on the cheek. Later, the same girl “throws both of her arms around me and gives me a huge hug . . . then she leans in and kisses me. On the lips. Fireworks go off in my brain. It’s my first kiss. Ever.”

Violence

  • None

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • Norbert’s teacher’s name was “Mrs. Hurlbutt.”
  • When seeing a brontosaurus Norbert makes a comment that “its breath smells worse than Mrs. Hurlbutt’s perfume, Butt Thunder.”
  • Norbert thinks one of the other kids is a “jerk.”

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • Loving Leader says he “sees all, knows all, and loves all.”
  • During a meal, Warden Buckner says, “Since today is Backward Day, it’s now time for grace before the meal.” Norbert is confused why everyone “mumbles something different. One of the adults tells him, “You can say whatever grace you feel like saying.” When Norbert asks if they are praying to Loving Leader, the adult replies, “No, silly, to a higher power.”
  • Norbert is scared of a mysterious Black Box. At one point he thinks, “I don’t know much about the higher power Crazy Swayzee talks to when he says grace, but I beg that higher power to protect me from whatever awaits me in the Black Box.”
  • When Norbert and some of his friends sneak into an adult’s office, they are almost caught.  When Norbert hears steps, he starts “praying to a higher power that my stomach doesn’t suddenly growl.”

 

Out of Remote Control

The Data Set finds a time-altering remote control. In the hopes of discovering if their project for the science fair works, they hit the button and travel into the future. But from there everything goes wrong. When Laura drops the remote control, the kids are taken on a crazy adventure. Is there any way they can reset the remote control? Will they be stuck in an alternative universe forever?

Out of Remote Control takes the reader on a wildly fun adventure. As the kids jump into television shows, younger readers will enjoy the funny pictures of Dr. Bunsen as he plays the role of villain in every show. Each short chapter jumps to a new place. In an attempt to outrun danger, the kids keep hitting the buttons on the remote control, and they jump into new situations.

The kids work together to try to figure out how to return home. The funny black-and-white illustrations appear on every page and help beginning readers follow the plot. The illustrations add humor, but also help break up the text so new readers do not become overwhelmed with the number of words on the page. As the seventh installment of the series, Out of Remote Control doesn’t continue the plot from previous books and can be read as a singleton.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • The kids jump into an old western television show. When they arrive, they are on a train that is being held up by bandits. “The kids raced from train car to train car, with the bandits right behind them.” The kids are saved when they hit pause on the remote control.
  • The remote sends the kids into a shark show. When the kids swim away from the sharks, “the narrator laughed loudly, ‘SHARKS KNOW THAT THEIR PREY OFTEN HIDES BEHIND ROCKS.’” The kids hit a button on the remote and jump to a new channel.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • The kids find a remote control that can take them back in time or jump them into the future. The remote control takes the kids into television shows where they become the characters.

Spiritual Content

  • None

 

Heat

Twelve-year-old Michael Arroya dreams of playing in the Little League World Series. His pitching arm has some serious heat, but so does his day-to-day life. Michael must pretend that everything is all right, even though his father has died, and his seventeen-year-old brother is trying to take care of their needs. Michael and his brother keep their father’s death a secret from almost everyone. But then a man from social services gets curious and begins asking questions. Fear fills Michael because he’s afraid if anyone finds out the truth he’ll be separated from his brother or sent back to Cuba.

To make matters worse, some of the coaches wonder how a twelve-year-old boy can throw with so much power. When the league demands a birth certificate, Michael becomes ineligible. With no birth certificate, no parent, and no way to prove his age, how will Michael be able to make his baseball dreams come true?

Heat is not just a book about baseball; it is a book about family, friendship, and never giving up on your dreams. The story integrates play-by-play baseball action, with the suspense of Michael’s home life and the secrets he is trying to keep. The relationships between Michael’s friend, Manny, and his brother, Carlos, add interest and heart to the story. Even though Michael’s father has died, his voice still rings through his sons’ memories. This allows the father to voice important life lessons to his sons even after his death.

The story deals with the difficult theme of losing a parent, maintaining secrets, and the struggles immigrant families face. Carlos struggles to become the man of the house and keep Michael focused on his dream. The characters’ conflict has just enough detail to add suspense to the story while staying kid-friendly. By watching the characters struggle, the reader will learn the importance of staying positive and never giving up. Heat is an easy-to-read story that will appeal to sports lovers. Because the story has a lot of play-by-play baseball action, this book will not appeal to those who do not enjoy sports.

Sexual Content
• None

Violence
• When a boy steals a purse from Mrs. Cora, she “hit the ground hard, rolled on her side, feeling dizzy. . .”
• Papi watched an argument and then, “he saw the man raise a hand to the woman, knock her down to the ground.” When Papi told the man to stop, the man, “took one swing before Papi put him down . . . The man got up, tried to charge Papi like a bull. But Papi put him down again.”
• A pitcher “went into his full wind-up and threw a fastball that hit Michael in the head.” The story implies the pitcher hit Michael on purpose.

Drugs and Alcohol
• None

Language
• One of the characters is referred to as “Justin the Jerk” throughout the story.
• When a pitcher throws a ball and hits Michael, someone says, “I can’t believe they didn’t throw that puss out of the game.”
• Michael’s friend calls him “jerkwad” and later a “jerkball.”

Supernatural
• None

Spiritual Content
• Michael’s Papi told him that, “You cannot teach somebody to have an arm like yours . . . It’s something you are born with, a gift from the gods, like a singer’s voice.”
• When Michael has a baseball in his hand, he doesn’t “have a list of questions he wants to ask God.”
• Michael’s Papi would say, “If you only ask God ‘why’? when bad things happen, how come you don’t ask him the same questions about all the good?”
• Michael’s brother reminds him that, “Papi said if we had all the answers we wouldn’t have anything to ask God later.”
• Michael tells his friend to stop talking because “the baseball gods you’re always telling me about? They’re hanging on every word right now.”
• On the wall of the Yankee Stadium clubhouse a sign read, “I want to thank the Good Lord for making me a Yankee. Joe DiMaggio.”

The New Kid

There’s something strange about the new kid in school. Zeke eats strange food, acts strange, and uses strange words when he talks. Harris thinks Zeke is an alien (and he’s right), but no one believes him. Not even his best friend Roxy. Harris is determined to prove that Zeke is an alien. Will Zeke’s strange behavior give him away or will he be able to keep his secret?

Zeke’s strange behavior will engage beginning readers as well as teach an endearing lesson about friendship and being kind to others. The story is humorous not only because of Zeke’s odd behavior but also because no one believes Harris when he claims that Zeke is an alien. Harris looks at comic books and watches a movie about aliens, and Zeke acts just like the characters in the book/movie. The black-and-white illustrations show Zeke and fictional aliens doing the same things, which adds to the humor.

Besides the fun topic, The Alien Next Door has a variety of other elements that are perfect for students who are transitioning to chapter books. Each page contains illustrations that help break up the text. The illustrations will also help readers understand the wide range of emotions each character feels. The large font, simple vocabulary, short chapters, and dialogue make The Alien Next Door a fun book to add to a beginning reader’s book list.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • None

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • An alien family comes to earth to research humans. In order to go unobserved, they take human form. “The green being began to glow. When the glowing stopped, a human-looking man stood in its place.”
  • On one of the planets Zeke lived on, kids “do cool stuff like teleport place to place. And control the weather with their minds.”
  • Zeke can make things move with his mind. While playing soccer, “Zeke wiggled his hand. The soccer ball slowed down, stopped, then started rolling back toward Zeke.”

Spiritual Content

  • None

 

The Locker Ate Lucy!

As hall monitor, Sam Graves is supposed to keep the kids of Eerie Elementary safe. Sam and his friends, Lucy and Antonio, know the school is alive, but they’re not prepared for how scary the school can be. When a locker eats Lucy, it’s up to Sam and Antonio to save her. Will they be able to save Lucy before they become Eerie Elementary’s lunch?

The next installment in the Eerie Elementary series, The Locker Ate Lucy, will continue to captivate readers because of its spooky, action-packed fun. Many of the pages end with cliffhangers that will make the reader want to continue reading. Black-and-white illustrations and onomatopoeia help create the story’s tone. The book contains simple sentence structures and a straightforward plot.

The easy-to-follow plot is entertaining and appropriate for newly independent readers. However, The Locker Ate Lucy will be enjoyed by older readers as well. Those who enjoy the Notebook of Doom series will want to jump into the world of Eerie Elementary. Readers will enjoy seeing the friends work together and come up with creative ways to escape. The story ends with discussion questions that add to the learning value of the book.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • When a locker eats Lucy, Jack and Antonio go into a vent to search for her. In order to stop them, “the vent squeezed tighter, closing around them! It pressed against Sam’s shoulders. It pressed against his legs.” They escape when the vent comes to an end.
  • A lunch cart tried to make Sam and Antonio its lunch. “CLICK CLACK! The lid snapped like a mouth as it rolled toward them. . . Then just as it was about to hit them, the boys jumped out of the way.”
  • Everything in the basement comes to life. A dodge ball, a Frisbee, and “roller skates that shot toward his legs like cannonballs” fly towards Sam and Antonio. When they try to run, “something long that looked like a spear was headed for Antonio. A whiffle ball bat.”
  • A “maze of rusty old pipes” are alive and have Lucy, who is “suspended in midair, hanging upside down. One of the pipes was wrapped around her ankle.”
  • When Sam and Antonio free Lucy, the school tries to drown them. “Water bubbled up through the crack in the floor. It was rising fast.” The friends are able to escape.
  • Sam ends up alone in the cafeteria. As he was hanging from a curtain, “the water on the lunchroom floor began rising. It was taking shape. It was becoming something. . . The water was taking the form of a giant hand.” The hand tears the curtain that Sam is hanging on, but Sam comes up with a plan to save himself.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • “Orson Eerie was a mad scientist. He was also the architect who designed Eerie Elementary almost one hundred years ago. Orson Eerie found a way to live forever—he became the school. Orson Eerie was the school, and the school was Orson Eerie! Eerie Elementary was a living, breathing thing that fed on students.”

Spiritual Content

  • None

We Are All Made Of Molecules

Stewart always wanted a sister. However, he never imagined that it would take his mother’s death, and his father moving in with his girlfriend before he got his wish. Plus Ashley isn’t anything close to being the sister of his dreams. She’s one year older than Stewart, and they have nothing in common.

Ashley is a typical mean girl whose only concern is staying at the top of the social ladder. So when her father announces that he is moving out because he is gay, Ashley fears that if any of her friends find out about her father’s gayness, it will ruin her social standing. Then when her mother’s boyfriend and son move in, Ashley’s anger ramps up even more. After all, Stewart is a total nerd.

We are all made of molecules is told from the points of view of Stewart and Ashley, who are both loveable in their own way. Stewart is a logical nerd who just wants to fit in. Ashley is a self-centered, angry teen who is trying to deal with the upheaval in her life. Having the story told by both Stewart and Ashley gives the book an interesting twist, because not only can the reader see each character’s thoughts and feelings, but the reader also sees how the two view each other.

Through Ashely’s experiences, the reader learns about the danger of drinking as well as the sexual dangers girls may face. In the end, Ashley realizes that outward appearances are not as important as she thought, and that nerdy Stewart may just know a thing or two about friendship.

We are all made of molecules is an easy-to-read, fun story that explores the messy relationships of parents. Ashley’s father reveals that he is gay, and his gay boyfriend appears. Ashley’s mother has her boyfriend and son move in. In the story, the group of five is shown becoming a unique family unit.

Sexual Content

  • A subplot of the story is about Ashley’s divorced father, Phil, who has revealed that he is gay. In one scene, Phil tells Stewart, “I didn’t decide to be gay. It’s not something you choose.” They then discuss why Phil married Ashley’s mother and didn’t tell people he was gay until two years ago. Phil says, “I didn’t want to be gay. I grew up in a very conservative and strict religious family . . . I made myself believe I was straight.”
  • Ashley sees her father kiss another man.
  • In the locker room, Stewart, “sat quietly on one of the benches and tried not to stare, but it was impossible not to notice that almost every single guy in my class was well into puberty. They had hair in all the right places, and their you-know-whats actually dangled. . . Mine does not dangle. Mine is more like a protruding belly button.”
  • Ashley watches an episode on TV about a guy that found out that, “he wasn’t the father of his girlfriend’s baby, and that the real father was the guy’s own brother.”
  • Jared says to Stewart, “You have the hots for your stepsister, don’t you? Gross, Stewie, that’s verging on incest.”
  • Ashley goes to Jared’s house and while there he pushed her onto the bed and tried to take her shirt off. “I grabbed his hands, but he kept yanking . . . I tried to move, but he pinned my arms down. When I looked at his face, it was as if he’d gone somewhere else. It was like I wasn’t even there . . .He was pulling at my shirt and my skirt at the same time.” Then the housekeeper comes in and Ashley leaves.
  • At a party, Ashley is passed out on her bed. After Jared and his friend make sure Ashely was completely out of it, Jared pulls up her shirt and takes a picture of her in her bra. Jared then pulls up her skirt and takes a picture of her underwear.” Then Stewart shows up and runs off with Jared’s phone and calls the police.
  • When some of the students at school find out that Ashely’s father is gay, one of the characters says, “I think it’s so cool that your dad is gay. It’s so . . . twenty-first century. Very cutting-edge. Ashley is then invited to the LGBT club. Ashley says, “But I’m not gay. Or lesbian, or bi, or transatlantic.”

Violence

  • Stewart tries to hide in the locker room because he doesn’t want to take a shower with the other boys. When Jared notices him, he “grabbed my gym shorts and yanked them down around my ankles . . .Then suddenly he grabbed hold of my boxers and I realized with sphincter-tightening horror that he was about to pull them down.” Then the teacher walks in and Jared leaves.
  • When Jared sees Stewart in the locker room, he again tries to pull his pants down. Stewart was prepared and wearing a wrestling uniform. Then Jared, “Yanked my T-shirt up and over my head. I couldn’t see a thing. I felt his hand grab one of the straps of my wrestling uniform and pull it down . . .” Before Jared can get the uniform off Stewart, Steward reveals that he is Ashley’s brother and Jared stops.
  • Stewart is wearing the school bulldog mascot costume and scares Ashley. “She started pummeling me . . . She started kicking me. I tried to shout, but my voice was muffled, and her screams drowned me out.”
  • Jared was kicked out of a private school. He said he, “dealt with someone who needed dealing with. Guy was a colossal turd, and everyone knew it.” Later in the story, it is revealed that in the locker room, Jared beat up the guy because he was gay. “Then I saw him looking at my junk after our final game, so I punched him . . . stupid faggot.”
  • Jared said that Ashley was a, “total tease. All she’s let me do is squeeze her tits a few times. Outside her clothes . . . I’ll break that bitch down.”
  • Stewart remembers a time when a little boy was throwing rocks at him. The little boy’s mom and Stewart’s mom got into an argument. “That’s when my mom picked up a stone and threw it at [the kid]. Not hard, but still; I couldn’t believe my eyes . . . Then she threw a second stone.”
  • Stewart is dressed up as the school mascot when Jared comes up to him and talks badly about Ashley. When Jared walks onto the basketball court, Steward, “was working on pure fury when I ran onto the court and plowed my dog-head into Jared’s stomach . . . I ran behind him and pulled his gym shorts, along with his underwear, down to his ankles.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Jared invites Ashely over to his house. Jared drinks a beer and Ashley has a wine spritzer.
  • Ashley has a party. Some of Jared’s friends show up. “They were carrying bottles of vodka and rum and stuff, probably stolen from their parents’ liquor cabinets.”

Language

  • One of the characters describes her family as FUBER. Then she explains the term is a military term that means, “’Effed Up Beyond All Recognition,’ but in the military, they don’t say ‘effed.’”
  • Ashley called a girl’s mother a “skank.”
  • When her mother’s boyfriend compliments the pasta, Ashley thinks, “which was a total butt-kiss because the pasta was just so-so.”
  • Ashley describes her mom’s boyfriend as having, “MPAL (Male Pattern Ass Loss, a tragic and devastating syndrome in aging men.”
  • When Ashley finds out Stewart is in the same English class as her, she thinks, “OH MY GOD . . . This cannot be happening.”
  • Ashley said she had a “crappy day.” She also tells her friend that a pair of jeans makes her “ass look fat.”
  • Profanity is not used frequently, but it is scattered throughout the book. The profanity includes: hell, ass, bitch, pissed, slut, faggot, shit.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • Stewart thinks about his dead mother. “Even though the scientific part of my brain tells me she probably isn’t looking down on me from heaven, and that all that is left of her is random molecules, I feel a deep need to do this for her.”

Tin Star

Left for dead at a space station far from Earth, Tula is focused on getting revenge. Revenge for the beating Brother Blue gave her. Revenge for the death of her family and the other members of the group who had hoped to colonize a planet. In order to get revenge, Tula must first learn to survive in the underguts of the space station.

Luckily, an alien named Heckleck befriends Tula. Heckleck teaches her how to trade with the natives and gives her a desperately needed friend. Just when life on the space station began to seem normal, three humans crash land on the station, and Tula wants to use this opportunity to get her revenge. She soon discovers that taking down Brother Blue may mean the end of Earth. Should she take this opportunity to destroy her greatest enemy or protect the planet that she loves?

Tula and Heckleck are loveable characters that show that friendships can grow despite physical differences. Even though Tula trades with questionable people, she has an honorable code of ethics that she lives by. This code allows other characters to trust and respect her.

Because the story is written from Tula’s point of view, the reader has the opportunity to feel her pain, understand her desire for revenge, as well as see her desire to do what is right. The author uses vivid description to bring Tula to life and make the reader care for her.

Although the book has some violence and sexual content, these scenes are not described in detail, and they are in the book to advance the plot, not merely to add to the entertainment factor of the book.

Overall Tin Star is an entertaining book that gives readers a glimpse into a believable space world, where different species learn to care for each other despite the harshness of life.

Sexual Content

  • At the space station, two people can fight in a hotch. This is a way to settle disagreements.  Tula is forced to fight one of the humans in a hocht. During the hocht, Tula thinks, “I had never been this close to a man . . . his mouth was near my ear, his breath hot. He had some stubble on his cheek. His skin was warmed. His smell filled me . . . I wanted to both pull away and also pull in closer but my eyes kept going over to Reza, who was watching from the side. I stumbled backward. Wishing that I was doing this dance with him.”
  • When Tula is talking to an Earth boy, she describes, “His lips were just inches away from mine. I was on fire. As Reza spoke, I could feel his breath on my face, and I opened my lips hoping to catch his words in my mouth.” Later in the same scene, Tula thinks, “Every part of me reached for him. I ran my hands through his hair. He smelled kind. I had no words for pain, for despair, for loneliness. I put my lips on his. Our hands found each others’ skin. My body trembled. I had to stop before I exploded . . . I had gone hungry at times during my time here, but truly I had been ravenous for touch. I knew that I would not be able to survive without it anymore. It was nourishing, intoxicating, and addictive.”
  • When a female Earth girl is trying to manipulate Tula, the girl uses physical touch. “She put her hands on my shoulders. She kissed me. It was a warm kiss. Full of affection and softness. But it was so different from Reza . . . She kissed me again. The kiss was electric, but had no warmth to it. No love. She was trying to manipulate me, and to get what I wanted I would have to go with it . . . After a while we stopped kissing. I held her in my arms the way that I held Reza, but it was far from the same.”

Violence 

  • Brother Blue punches Tula in the face. “He hit me again, and now I was too stunned to scream. He did not stop until I was limp . . . It was only when he thought that I was dead that he moved away from me. . .”
  • Heckleck, a bug-like alien, uses his tongue that, “looked like a sharp pointy bard” to injected Tula with nanites, which gave her the ability to understand Universal Galactic as well as breathe the air on the space station. After Heckleck injects her, she feels ill and wonders if he was, “calmly waiting to finish me off at his leisure, picking off parts of me when needed.” She then goes on to think, “Maybe this insect-like alien had done me a kindness. After all, I had just thought about killing myself and had been too cowardly to do it.”
  • Heckleck gives Tula a cloth that contained a digit from someone’s crew member. Tula is instructed to, “tell him to give you the item, or I’ll send the rest of the crew member to him in pieces.” He then threatens to kill Tula if she betrays him.
  • Tula thinks back to her childhood fights. “There was hair pulling with my friend over a doll we both wanted. There was a slap and a push I gave to my sister, Bitty, when we were fighting.  There was a kick to the groin I’d given a boy at school who had tried to paw me at a party.  Then I turned my thoughts to the fights I’d witnessed. My father, drunk over the holidays, fists in front of him, always jabbing at my equally drunk uncle, face covered with his arms but his stomach getting pummeled. I remembered the bully from school, Mika, fighting the scrawny Stan: Mika moving quick from side to side while Stan crouched low, always hitting Mika’s spleen. And of course Brother Blue, standing over me and kicking in my ribs.”
  • Tula and an Earth boy fight in a hotch. They push and hit each other, and at one point Tula, “brought my knee up to his groin.” In the end, Caleb allows Tula to beat him.

Drugs and Alcohol 

  • Kitsch Rutsok’s bar is a popular hangout place on the space station.

Language 

  • None

Supernatural 

  • None

Spiritual Content 

  • While discussing the dead, Heckleck said, “But the dead, they have ghosts. Ghosts are very useful for haunting. Never forget the dead, Tula. They have their function. They sometimes speak at the most useful or inopportune times.”
  • Tula likes to go to the Gej temple. The Gej were a highly spiritual race who are no longer at the space station. When Tula had an item that she did not know how to trade she would, “bring it to one of the shrines and place it as an offering. I liked making offerings to gods I did not know. It seemed somehow more pure. Did the Gej have one god or many? Were they even gods at all?  I wasn’t certain. But when I put a cracked gem down or a burned a sole stick of incense, it called me as if I was wishing on fallen and forgotten stars. Perhaps I’d given a gift to a deity who cared only for love. Perhaps I’d placed a trinket on a devil. I couldn’t be sure, and I didn’t care.”

Melting Stones

Evvy is a young stone mage; someone who can communicate with and control stone. Her mentor is a nature mage, and their less-than-welcome traveling companion is a water mage. These three have powers that frighten and impress most people they meet, but they might not be enough to stop what’s coming to the island of Starns. Strange deaths and earth shakes are only a hint of what is to come, and Evvy will need all the help she can get if she is to survive.

Melting Stones is a wonderful stand-alone novel. Evvy is not a people person. She would rather be alone with her rocks than talking to people, but she has a beautiful soul. This is a story of a traumatized girl learning to be a better and more caring person. Placed in an intriguing world of mages and spirits, this story will be enjoyed by kids of many ages.

Sexual Content

  • ” ‘Bored is the last thing we’ll be!’ The man laughed. I suppose they were talking about fooling around. People always think they have to discuss it like I don’t know what it is. That’s grown-ups for you. I let them do their sideways joking about sex, while I let my power trail along the ocean floor.”

Violence

  • Evvy disarms and beats up a couple of boys. “I had a problem with some rich boys . . . They were bothering some of my friends. I said I would hit them with my staff if they didn’t stop, and they drew swords and daggers on me. It wasn’t as if I actually broke any of their bones.”
  • Evvy has a flashback from a war she was in. She panics and accidentally hurts a companion. “Terror flooded me. I forgot where I was. I thought I was a captive . . . Was I back in Gyongxe? . . . They beat me last time! They’d beat me again to make me tell on my friends. I screamed and slammed my head forward, hard, into the soldier’s nose. Then I lashed sideways and bit deep into his arm.”
  • Evvy talks about a war she was in. She says, “I knew where people were hiding. The soldiers tried to make me tell by hitting the bottoms of my feet with a cane.”
  • Jayat confesses that his master used to beat him, and Evvy thinks, “My owner had beaten me when I was a slave, after all. Joobe-Hooba . . . would have beaten me. I bet he would have smiled as he did it.”
  • Nory is upset and hits Evvy. “Even if I could have moved, I wouldn’t have been fast enough to escape the hard slap she landed on my cheek. Then she slapped me again. She was crying . . . Then she punched me in the eye and walked off.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • Evvy’s mentor drinks a medicinal tea, though it is not said why. ” ‘Did you drink your medicine tea?’ I asked her. ‘The kind that smells like boiled mule urine?’ “

Language

  • Evvy complains that people aren’t grateful for mage services. “They should half-kill themselves in the service of this, this beetle-spit village next to its chicken-piddle lake on its donkey-dung island.”

Supernatural

  • Mages can commune with certain elements of nature, like growing things, rocks or water. “Alongside the ship came a long arm of seawater with Rosethorn’s hat on top of it. It passed the hat to Myrrhtide, who patted the tentacle as he’d pet a good dog.”
  • Luvo is the heart of a mountain. He appears as a small crystal bear who can talk and walk.
  • Evvy has a spirit self that can travel through stone. “In my magical shape I swooped through a vein of rock-water, the indigo crystal cooling me as I passed . . . My magical body was all ideas and power, controlled by my mind, but I was certain that if my magical self burned to ashes, my real body would die, too.”
  • Evvy senses magma spirits. Their energy is so enticing Evvy appears as though possessed while pursuing it.
  • Evvy meets magma spirits. “When they’d first grabbed me they were like a pair of comets, gripping me with long, molten stone tails. Now they were shifting, their bodies getting shorter . . . Flare was sapphire blue, still with his trailing flame of hair. He had blacked-rimmed eyeholes around flame eyes.”
  • Local mages can’t control nature, but they can do some small spells. “Jayat and Tahar drew spell designs on the floor. Their lips moved as they called on the rocks to show where they came from.”
  • Luvo makes contact with the spirits of several islands. “I didn’t know this great, female voice, but it was familiar. I knew the stones in it, from mica to obsidian to basalt. It sounded like . . . Starns. It sounded like the island.”

Spiritual Content

  • Slavery is looked down on, but is legal in some places. Evvy says, “my mother sold me as a slave when I was six. It was because I was one mouth too many, and only a girl.”
  • Evvy says she would leave the villagers to deal with the volcano. “It’s their island, they have to solve getting off. They’re lucky I could warn them.” Her mentor asks, “You would abandon even the babies, Evvy?”
  • Evvy says, “Heibei, take this bad luck and bury it . . . Heibei’s the god of luck back home in Yanjing. I asked him for help. He’s a good god, not undependable, like your Lakik.” She mentions a few other gods as well, for example, “Kanzan the Merciful smile on me.”
  • After the volcanic incident is resolved, Evvy says crossing the island, “was like a journey through the hell of those who defy the Yanjing will of heaven. I thought I’d stopped believing in those hells, but they hadn’t stopped believing in me. They had followed me all the way here. This one had, anyway.”
  • “Gods of all stones be praised,” Luvo says. “We are not too late.”
  • A young boy tells Evvy that, “You mages is god-touched.”

by Morgan Lynn

Timeless: Diego and the Rangers of the Vastlantic

Time collided. Now dinosaurs roam with robots. Humans from three different time periods now live on Earth. Diego’s parents come from two different time periods and hope to make their home, New Chicago, a better place.

In Diego’s world, conflict is ever-present. Not everyone believes that kids from different eras of history and from different cultures should interact. Some still wish for the world that they came from before time collided.

When Diego’s father, a New Chicago’s top engineer, is taken by rebels, Diego vows to help free his father. Diego thinks the key is to build bigger, stronger weapons. However, when he and three others accidentally end up on a pirate ship, Diego’s beliefs are challenged.

Diego and the Rangers of the Vastlantic gives the reader a glimpse of the struggles others faced during different eras, which gives the story interest. The story doesn’t just focus on how boys and girls often do not understand each other, but also how people from different cultures can also have conflict.

Although the story is full of action and has an epic battle scene, the violence is not described in great detail. Instead, sights and sounds are left to the reader’s imagination. Stunning illustrations enhance the story and help bring the new world to life. Diego and the Rangers of the Vastlantic is a story about friendship, family, and seeing others in a new way. In the end, Diego learns that powerful weapons are not the key to keeping his world safe.

Sexual Content

  • Two boys have a sparring match and the winner gets a kiss from Paige. One of the boys says, “Sadly for you, only one lovely lady will get to know the thrill of these lips.” Later the winner describes the kiss, “But it wasn’t exactly a kiss. More like an attack on my face. Her lips were, like, strong.”

Violence

  • Diego and a group are cornered by a bully and his gang. Diego “Slammed Fish across the face with it (skateboard) and a girl ‘judo flipped’ a boy to the floor.”
  • A rebel group attacks a power plant and kidnap about a dozen engineers. “A marine lay on the floor nearby, unmoving . . . Shots. More gunshots. Fists colliding, the thump of bodies hitting the floor.” During the attack, a man holds a sword against Diego’s father’s throat.
  • Rebels attack a boat carrying some of the engineers’ families. “More pops. Splintering cracks. . . The gunfire seemed to come from everywhere . . . Bullets zinged past Diego’s head.” Diego’s mother shoots the rebel’s boat and it explodes.
  • When trying to escape from dinosaurs, Diego crashes his gravity board on a cliff. “The beast began to throw their massive bodies against the wall, trying to dislodge him.” Diego is rescued.
  • The rebels attack the pirate ship and the battle plays out over an entire chapter. The battle is not described in graphic detail.
  • The pirates, trying to save the engineers, attack the rebel’s base. The attack happens over several chapters. Diego shoots at one of the bad guys. When someone is injured, the description jumps in time, which allows the reader to imagine what happened. One of the characters is killed, but his death is not described.
  • When someone calls Diego a “clock mongrel,” Diego’s father hits him. “George spun and crumpled to the floor.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • A boy “sucked on his cigarette, the end glowing. . .”
  • The pirate captain is seen asleep with a half-empty bottle of vodka and Diego assumes he is drunk.

Language

  • Profanity is used rarely, but includes bastards, crap, crud, damn, hell, holy crap, and pisses.
  • When Lucy is saved from a dinosaur, she said, “Oh my God, I thought I was done for!” She uses this phrase twice.
  • When Diego finds out that pirates have been hired to find his father and the other engineers, Diego said, “Hell, I should be allowed to go before some hired guns.”
  • When Diego tells his friend about the pirates, his friend replies, “bloody hell!”
  • The rebel group is referred to as “bastards.”
  • When Paige makes a meal, the available food is referred to as “nasty crap.”
  • According to Diego, one of the girls acts like “everything I do pisses her off.”

Supernatural

  • Diego and his father have “the Maker’s Sight,” which allows them to see how different machine parts work together. “It shows me a series of images that allow me to make or fix anything.”
  • Diego wills baby turtles to surround Lucy. He explains how he did it. “It’s more like I can send them a thought, feeling, or image, and they seem to . . . act on it. It’s like hypnosis, I think.”
  • When describing “the Maker’s Sight,” Diego’s friend said, “You sound like one of those spiritual mediums we have back in London, communicating with the dead through their crystal balls.”

Spiritual Content

  • During a battle, the pirate captain said, “A prayer to your god of choice might also be helpful.”

The Last Kids on Earth

When the monster apocalypse hit Jack’s town, the thirteen-year-old retreated to his tree house. Everyone Jack knows has either run away or been zombified. Jack has been living in his tree house, which he’s armed to the teeth with catapults and a mote. Living on Oreos and Mountain Dew, Jack spends his time playing video games and scavenging stores.

Jack realizes that he can’t handle zombies, Winged Wretches, and Vine Thingies alone. He goes out to search for his best friend, Quint. Along the way he finds a team comprised of a reformed bully named Dirk, a pet monster, and a girl named June (who becomes Jack’s love interest).

Surviving a monster apocalypse will be difficult; however, life gets more dangerous when the intelligent gargantuan menace known as the Blarg sets his sights on Jack. He will need his entire team to defeat the monster.

Told from Jack’s point of view, the monster apocalypse comes to life with humor. Jack’s desire to care for his friends is clear. When Jack searches for June in the hopes of rescuing her, he discovers that she is a strong character that doesn’t need a knight in shining armor. Black and white illustrations add to the story. For a book filled with monsters, the story is more fun than frightening. Packed with action, The Last Kids on Earth will engage readers from the first page to the last.

Sexual Content

  • June Del Toro is Jack’s “love interest”. When introducing her, Jack says, she has “legs that just won’t quit (no idea what that means, I’ve heard it in a movie. I guess her legs are resilient?)”
  • Jack finds June in the school building. “In the dim light, I can make out that it’s June. Hey, I just used ‘make out’ and ‘June’ in the same sentence. Go me!”
  • Jack and his friend discuss if it is possible to “call dibs” on a girl.

Violence

  • A monster tries to smash Jack. The battle is described over several pages. “The monster’s massive fist pounds the roof until it cracks like thin ice. I trip, tumble back, and land hard on my bony butt .” When the monster smiles, he reveals “an army of dirty fangs, with chunks of flesh between each tooth.” When Jack hits the monster over the head, the monster drops him and Jack gets free.
  • A monster grabs the school bus. “The monster tilted the bus so the back pointed toward the sky. We all pinballed, plummeting down the aisle, smashing against the seats, backpacks flying through the air.” Jack and his best friend escape. The fate of the other occupants on the bus is not mentioned.
  • Zombies come after Jack. The zombie’s “throat is missing—just a bunch of gnarly old flesh there. He comes at me, practically jumping.” Jack whacks the zombie in the face with a hockey stick.
  • A monster eats a zombie. “He roars and shoves the undead thing into his mouth. As he chews, the sound of the poor zombie’s snapping ones echoes across the empty suburban street.”
  • A flying monster almost gest Jack. Dirk saves him. “Dirk hurls the Winged Wretch into the closest building . . . The monster lets off a pained howl, then flies off into the distance. . . “
  • A Blarg attacks. “Blarg’s like a tank, crushing cars and stomping shopping carts beneath his feet.” Jack and Dir use butter to make the monster crash.
  • June throws tennis balls at the zombies, who used to be her teachers. Later, the zombies attack the kids and there is a fight that is complete with illustrations. The fight goes on for several pages.
  • The Blarg attacks the kids. Jack uses a sling shot to fling an acid capsule into the Blarg’s eye. “A demonic howl erupts from Blarg’s lungs. He paws at his face, trying to wipe away the sizzling chemical mixture.” When the Blarg chases the kids, they throw a big-screen TV at him. The battle against the Blarg last for three chapters. Jack kills the Blarg with a “Louisville Slicer.”  The monster “howls. I’m dangling from the blade, gripping tight, as the monster’s legs give out and he comes crashing down.”

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • Jack calls a monster a jerk. Later he thinks, “I hate jerks—whether they’re monster jerks or zombie jerks or just regular human jerks.”
  • Jack says “crud” several times. When a monster tries to hit Jack, he thinks, “oh crud.” When the monster is looking for Jack, he says, “holy crud.”
  • Dirk calls Jack a dork.

Supernatural

  • None

Spiritual Content

  • None

 

The Last Kids on Earth and the Zombie Parade

A strange shrieking. Disappearing Zombies. New monsters appearing. Jack and his three friends keep hearing an eerie shrieking that summons the zombies. They are determined to discover where the zombies are going. Along the way, they encounter a giant Wormungulous, a pizza parlor monster hideout, an ancient evil who destroys worlds, and a stereo system that is totally the bomb.

The mystery of the strange shrieking isn’t the only problem Jack is facing. As a foster kid, Jack never had the chance to make friends. The monster apocalypse changed that. Now that he has a family, he wonders if he can trust them to stay alive on their own. He worries about all of the what-ifs—what if they get hurt? Or eaten? Or chopped up? Or zombified? Can Jack learn to trust his friends and allow them to help him stay safe?

In the end, Jack realizes that “Friends are important. Family is important. . . But even a post-apocalyptic action hero can’t keep them safe all the time.” He also learns that not all monsters are wicked and that battling together is the only way to defeat evil.

The Last Kids on Earth and the Zombie Parade is told in the same humorous tone as the first book in the series. Each of the kids is given unique talents and is shown to be strong in different ways. The Last Kids on Earth and the Zombie Parade will be a hit with readers of all ages.

Sexual Content

  • None

Violence

  • A Wormungulous lives in the mall and chases the kids. Jack hits the monster with a boomerang. “There’s a BLAST as smoke bombs and bang snaps and sparklers explode. The monster jerks to the left, veers band to the right. . . “ Jack and Quint are able to escape.
  • Later the Womungulous finds the kids and gives chase. Jack sticks the monster with a blade. “The monster shrieks in pain and its thick tail whips into me . . . I slam into the side of PacSun.” A man-monster pushes the kids out of the way.
  • A Hairy-Eyeball Monster attacks the Jack and Quint. The monster fires quills at the kids. One of the quills pins Quill to a headstone.
  • Zombies follow a strange shrieking noise. The kids follow, trying to figure out where the zombies are going, they see “undead bodies soar through the air like they’ve been launched from a catapult . . . We watch as limp zombie bodies pound the cement like mortar shells.” The zombie’s brains had been sucked out.
  • A Winged Wretch attacks. “The monster’s razor-sharp talons grab the zombie by the shoulders . . . the Winged Wretch beats its wing and thrust upward, into the sky.”
  • The kids find strange insects that combine to make a huge creature.  “. . . The insects begin to gather themselves. Amassing, assembling, joining together to form something nightmarish . . . I try to run, but the horror in front of me is too much . . .” Dirk saves Jack.
  • The zombies follow a strange shrieking sound. “As each zombie stumbles into the clearing, the tree’s branches move and shift. The branches snap and reach down in a series of chilling, herky-jerky movements. . . The branches open at the end, like ferocious wooden mouths—and they inhale the zombies.”
  • The Wormungulous chases Jack into a cage. “It’s wrapping around the cage like an oversized, ultra-awful anaconda . . . I feel like I’m in the trash compactor in Star Wars.” The monster’s energy runs out and Jack realizes that the Wormungulous has a festering wound and needs help.
  • Thrull, a giant monster, grabs Jack and throws him through the treehouse wall. “Wood splinters and shatters. A second later I crash-land into a pile of leaves.” When Dirk tries to help Jack, “Thrull backhands him—a slap that sends Dirk sprawling into Rover so that they both land in a heap.” Thrull puts the kids in a cage and takes them to the Tree of Entry. When Thrull is eaten by the tree, he turns into a monster.
  • The kids unite with monsters to defeat Thrull the Tree Beast. The battle is described over several pages. Jack is swallowed by Thrull the Tree Beast. “Thrull the Tree Beast shrieks! Wood snaps and cracks around me. At my feet, jutting out of the barrel, the bottle rocket burns . . . The trunk of the tree shatters completely. . . My body is rocked—a title wave of explosive energy rips through me, hurling me from the inside of the tree.” In the end, Jack is saved when the kids defeat Thrull the Tree Beast with weed killer and bottle rockets.

Drugs and Alcohol

  • None

Language

  • None

Supernatural

  • The children are tricked into completing a bestiary. “I have filled the bestiary with magical energy. When the bestiary is full, the essence of the creatures inside will transform the book into a key.” The key will be used to let an ancient monster into the world, which wants to feed on others.
  • Thrull plants vines that turn into a Tree of Entry. The tree feeds an ancient monster. Trull must complete an incantation in order to bring the ancient monster to this world.
  • Thrull sacrifices himself to the tree. “He cackles like a mad, giggling demon and gives me a final look before his eyes shut and her roars, ‘TAKE ME.’” The Viney-Thinks eat Thrull.

Spiritual Content

  • None

 

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