The WeirDo series always makes me wish I could turn back the clock to enable me to appreciate them from the perspective of a child. Sure, adult me loves them but I’m certain kid me would have reread them so often my copies would be practically falling apart. Kid me definitely would have been in awe of their brilliant lenticular covers!
In Weirdomania!, Miss Franklin has asked her class to write about the jobs their parents have previously done. Weir’s mother currently works at the animal hospital and his father is a firefighter but he doesn’t know any jobs they’ve held before these ones.
Weir and his friend Bella learn interesting and funny new stories about their parents. They also discover their families share a love of wrestling, in particular a champion wrestler called ‘The Block’. (Hmm, that name sounds familiar …)
There are plenty of dad jokes to go around in this book, so many in fact that even the kids join in.
‘I guess I’m just a chip off the old BLOCK!’
Bella and her family are looking forward to seeing ‘The Block’ beat his opponent, Ka-Boom, at Wrestle-Crazia but Weir’s family don’t have tickets. Weir is hoping to win them by putting together the best costume for Funny Friday, but first he needs to think of a brilliant idea.
It all works out in the end and everyone has a great time at Wrestle-Crazia,
where things go even better than expected!
I really enjoyed this story. I loved finding out the occupations of some of the parents of Weir’s classmates. Weir’s imagination was working overtime coming up with so many funny and unusual ideas for costumes, all of which came to life in the illustrations. I even learned something new about one of Weir’s family members.
The jokes are always so corny in this series but I still can’t keep the smile off my face whenever I read another book. Even the animals think this book’s funny!
As usual, Jules Faber’s illustrations enhance the humour, complimenting Anh Do’s story perfectly.
I would be quite happy to go back to the very beginning and binge reread the entire series. I love Weir and his family and I can’t wait to find out what they’re going to be doing next!
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
What’s a sheep’s best wrestling move? The LAMB CHOP!
Everyone is going nuts for WRESTLE-CRAZIA the coolest wrestling show around! Can Weir come up with an awesome idea to WIN tickets for his whole family to see the show? It wont be easy … but it will be FUNNY!
I loved the first two Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy graphic novels so when I didn’t click with the third one, rather than move on and accept defeat, I decided I had to go back to square one to figure out what went wrong.
So, here I am at the very beginning, with Rabbit Boy casually admiring the beauty of the stars and Laser Moose suspicious of the dark because it’s “fraught with danger …”.
Both are oblivious to what is to come.
This Invasion chapter looks like it could use the expertise of Mulder and Scully!
Following on from their close encounter, it’s Day of the Aquabear, where we meet danger.
Oops! It was only Frank! Don’t worry. This is an ongoing gag. Frank will be fine.
Then we meet danger. We really do this time. It’s Aquabear, who was a regular brown bear merrily going about his business, preparing to eat a tasty fish, when he was slimed by some toxic waste and transformed into potential baddie material.
After making things worse, then a lot worse and then better (maybe), it’s time for our new favourite moose with the laser eyes and his rabbit sidekick to face the Terror of Mechasquirrel, but first we meet Cyborgupine,
who I assume is the epitome of evil. After all, he says, “MWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!” With that many “HA’s” after his “MWA” you know he’s gonna be trouble, and he is. After all, he’s Laser Moose’s nemesis and he has a new trick up his sleeve.
It’s been just over two years since I first read this graphic novel and it’s easy to remember what I loved about it. It’s fun. It’s silly. It’s got a moose that shoots lasers out of his eyes!
I didn’t find it quite as funny during my second read, which is why I’m giving it ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ instead of ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ this time around. However, it’s still an enjoyable introduction to some unusual (but somehow still loveable) animals and I’m keen to reread Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy’s other adventures.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
The forest is full of danger … but help is here. Meet Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, improbable pals who use their powers – laser vision and an unrelenting sense of optimism – to fight the forces of evil. Join the dynamic duo as they battle aliens, a mutant fish-bear, a cyborg porcupine, and a mechanical squirrel, learning along the way that looking on the bright side might be just as powerful as shooting a laser.
“Bond. James Bond.” I got roped into watching a whole bunch of these movies as a kid. I loved watching the gadgets in action, was oblivious to the innuendos soaring over my head and was terrified by some of the baddies. Yes, Jaws, I’m talking about you!
Rewatching a few of the early movies as an adult made me aware of some of the more problematic aspects of his character but aside from those particular niggles I still enjoy movies with big action sequences, gadgets and oodles of baddies. I haven’t watched a Bond movie in a few years but thought it would be fun to test drive a Bond graphic novel, and it was.
Black Box gets straight into the action
and introduces our potential leading lady (who incidentally isn’t immediately charmed by 007)
before the theme song earwig has had a chance to burrow its way into your brain.
007’s latest mission, Operation Black Box, requires him to travel to Tokyo to track down a “cache of digital secrets”. Evil hackers are ready to release your deepest, darkest digital secrets to the world! Let’s go get ‘em!
Yes, James does have a Licence to Kill. In fact, it’s expected. The big bad in this story is Saga Genji, who is responsible for the cyber theft, but my favourite character was his difficult to kill henchman, No Name, who makes up for his dodgy moniker with his creepy collection of death masks.
Armed with mission appropriate fancy gadgets and some even fancier new wheels
Bond is ready to face off with some baddies, but not before asking Boothroyd, the gadget guy (Q, I presume), to do some cyberstalking for him. Potential leading lady (she does have a name. It’s Selah Sax) isn’t getting away from 007 as quickly as she had hoped. Or perhaps it is Selah that is stalking James …
The usual Bond stuff happens. There’s gambling, alcohol, sex scenes, fight scenes where people get The Living Daylights beaten out of them, an explosion and a high speed pursuit, catchphrases, double entendres and a good ol’ villain monologue. Bond utilises his cool gadgets but also manages to improvise when the need arises. Who knew a selfie stick would make such a good weapon?!
I’m glad I read this graphic novel. After all, You Only Live Twice. 😜 It was a fun, quick read with plenty of action.
Thank you so much to NetGalley, Dynamite Entertainment and Diamond Book Distributors for the opportunity to read this graphic novel.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
In the snowbound French Alps, James Bond finds himself in the crosshairs of an assassin who targets other assassins. This is the first puzzle piece in a larger adrenaline-fueled mystery that will send Bond across the globe to infiltrate the underworld, risk everything in high-stakes casino gambling, evade deadly pursuers, and root out a digital breach threatening global security.
I’ve read this book so many times that I’ve lost count but each time I’ve tried to write my review I haven’t known what I wanted to say about it.
Thuy has been bullied at school again. She is angry and upset, but on her way home she notices her “jagged footprints”.
When she sees a lone bird, she imagines what it would be like to be able to fly away from danger and recreates its footprints in the snow. She continues to imagine other animals and makes their footprints her own as she arrives home.
“I want to be the biggest and strongest and scariest monster,” Thuy says, “so that if kids at school make fun of me for having two moms, or tell me to go back to where I come from, or call me names, or bother me because I’m a girl, I can make them stop!”
Together Momma Arti, Momma Ngoc and Thuy talk about which animals are strong and which are their favourites. Then Thuy imagines the best animal of all.
I loved Basia Tran’s illustrations, particularly Thuy’s Arti-Thuy-Ngoc-osaurus.
This imagined creature has footprints shaped like hearts, which I absolutely adored.
While I don’t think I would have appreciated this book as a child, adult me loves its messages. Thuy’s story tackles the impacts of bullying but also highlights the importance of having a supportive family. She is learning about courage and perseverance, and the power of her imagination, and I love her and her family more with each reread.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Capstone for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Every child feels different in some way, but Thuy feels “double different.” She is Vietnamese American and she has two mums. Thuy walks home one winter afternoon, angry and lonely after a bully’s taunts. Then a bird catches her attention and sets Thuy on an imaginary exploration. What if she could fly away like a bird? What if she could sprint like a deer, or roar like a bear? Mimicking the footprints of each creature in the snow, she makes her way home to the arms of her moms. Together, the three of them imagine beautiful and powerful creatures who always have courage – just like Thuy.
“You know, you ought to keep an eye on a little girl like that in this town.”
Kill Creek was one of my favourite reads of 2017 and I have been eagerly anticipating another Scott Thomas book ever since. When I saw the listing for Violet on NetGalley I jabbed that ‘Request’ button so hard it wouldn’t have surprised me to find an index finger shaped crack in my iPad screen. I was so excited about this book but I didn’t fall in love with it like I was supposed to and as a result I’ve spent the past fortnight dreading writing this review.
I still really want you to read Kill Creek and I hope that you love this book too. I want to be wrong about Violet. I want the problem to be me, not the book. However, I have some problems with this book that would have prevented me from reading beyond the first 10% if I hadn’t committed to reviewing it.
“There is something wrong with this place.”
While Scott’s debut was deliciously creepy and plot driven, with a group of horror writers attempting to survive Finch House (this house was my favourite character!), Violet is more atmospheric, an exploration of grief across time and its impacts upon multiple characters. I don’t usually mind novels where a slow burn gradually builds into a cataclysm of sorts but I found the set up too drawn out here. There were some nibbles along the ways but most of the payoff came after my interest had faded.
Her abuse of prescription medication chased down with a lot of alcohol, combined with the grief of her recent loss and snatches of memories of a more distant one, made Kris an unreliable narrator. This, along with her additional voices, those of Shadow Kris and Timid Kris, made me question whether anything I was reading was actually happening or not. Which parts of the story were real and which were distortions brewed up by a cocktail of trauma, chemicals and the possibility of an undiagnosed mental illness?!
Now, I’m rarely a fan of unreliable narrators in my life, either inside or outside of books, and as a result I never warmed to Kris. I was wary of trusting anything she relayed to me and so I kept her at an emotional distance. I probably would have connected with her daughter, Sadie, but because I saw her mostly through Kris’ eyes I didn’t know what to believe where she was concerned either.
“It is all connected, don’t you see that?”
Some words were used so frequently that I found myself being taken out of the story each time I came across them. By the time I reached 10% I’d considered counting how many times I encountered “like”, “as if” or “as though”. This trio weaved their way throughout the book, sometimes appearing two or three times on a (Kindle) page.
Then there were the descriptions of the house overlooking Lost Lake in general and of the cleaning process. Kris and Sadie need to make the neglected house habitable and the cleaning process was described in such detail that I was tempted to go clean my own home just so I could stop reading about it.
The lake house had helped Kris get through one of the most awful summers of her life. It could do the same for Sadie.
I hate that I felt like I was slogging my way through this book. The tidbits that teased of what was to come would usually have me hooked, poring over every word to make sure I didn’t miss any clues, but it didn’t work that way for me here. I didn’t feel like the story truly started until almost 70% and by then I was drained.
There were some glimpses of the magic that I enjoyed in Kill Creek and I could see myself enjoying a movie adaptation of this story, where the details that felt drawn out in the book could be captured quickly by the camera panning over each room, but overall it didn’t live up to its potential for me.
“Don’t be afraid to remember, Mrs Barlow.”
Despite all of this, I am still looking forward to the next book by this author. Their first book made such an impression on me that I am keen to see what other horrors they’re going to unleash upon my imagination. Maybe if I reread this book when I’m in a different head space I’ll find a new appreciation for it. If that’s the case I’ll definitely be letting you know. Until then I think I’m going to go with the hope that it’s not you, highly anticipated book; it’s me.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Inkshares for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
For many children, the summer of 1988 was filled with sunshine and laughter. But for ten-year-old Kris Barlow, it was her chance to say goodbye to her dying mother.
Three decades later, loss returns – her husband killed in a car accident. And so, Kris goes home to the place where she first knew pain – to that summer house overlooking the crystal waters of Lost Lake. It’s there that Kris and her eight-year-old daughter will make a stand against grief.
But a shadow has fallen over the quiet lake town of Pacington, Kansas. Beneath its surface, an evil has grown – and inside that home where Kris Barlow last saw her mother, an old friend awaits her return.
This is my first Big Nate read. Nate is a sixth grader who is well acquainted with detention.
I had no idea who was who before I started reading but I got a sense of each characters’ personality within this collection. While Nate annoyed me in the beginning, he began to grow on me towards the end of the collection. If I kept reading this series I think my favourite character would end up being one of Nate’s classmates rather than Nate himself, but I can see why kids would enjoy this series.
In this collection, Nate wants to be an undercover reporter for ‘The Bugle’. He also assists the school picture day photographer and discovers that students aren’t the only ones flashing their pearly whites.
Nate decides he wants to win the Student of the Month award, to the amusement of his long suffering teachers.
Gina and Francis face off in the Fact Town Smackdown, which ends with a cliffhanger.
Outside of school, Nate goes trick or treating, exchanges Christmas presents with his family and attempts to hide his report card from his father. He also surprises his father by doing some gardening. Sort of.
The comics were a mixed bag for me; some made me chuckle and others made me wish I was reading Peanuts instead. I understood the pop culture references but only because I’m old; I doubt kids would have even heard of Magnum P.I.
These strips appeared in newspapers from October 6, 2013, through March 29, 2014.
Thank you to NetGalley and Andrews McMeel Publishing for the opportunity to read this graphic novel.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Whether he’s showing the ropes to a detention rookie, campaigning for the Student of the Month Award, or writing hilarious movie reviews for The Weekly Bugle, Nate Wright never fails to make his mark at P.S. 38. But middle school’s no bed of roses. In fact, sometimes it just plain stinks. Just ask the Great Nose-ini! Nate’s alter ego with a sense for scents can smell trouble a mile away … or at the very next desk. Was that you, Gina?
Ahoy, me hearties! It be Talk Like a Pirate Day and I be watchin’ o’er Atticus and his crew from the crows nest of The Grandnan.
Ye see, when Van Tasticus lads and lassies reach their tenth birthday they get to plunder one piece o’ treasure from Grandnan Van Tasticus’ giant shed. They be needin’ to choose their bounty wisely as that be the only loot they get.
When it be Atticus’ birthday his landlubbing days be o’er as he be choosin’ a ship. Blimey!
Atticus and his crew set sail, seekin’ treasure and adventure. There be walkin’ the plank, a stowaway and some surprises.
This be the first in a new series. There be smiles for ye scallywags and details in the pictures that ye ol’ seadogs will appreciate, from well known paintings in Grandnan’s shed to Muscles and Mullet channelin’ their inner Rose and Jack on the bow of The Grandnan.
If ye be worryin’ about what yet scallywag be readin’, thar be a crew member that be sayin’ “crap”.
I plundered me a signed copy of this book. If ye be putting yer mark on a pirate book, this be how ye do it right! Aaarrr!
I be givin’ this treasure four Jolly Rogers. 🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️🏴☠️
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
A ten-year-old pirate captain? Absurd? Not in the world of Atticus Van Tasticus, a fabulously funny new illustrated junior fiction series from the brilliant and whacky creative minds of Andrew Daddo and Stephen Michael King.
1750, when times were tough and teeth were rotten …
As part of an ancient family tradition, young Atticus Van Tasticus narrowly escapes a life down the coal mines – or worse, going to school – when he gets to choose the gift of a pirate ship from his Grandnan’s treasure pile.
It’s a choice that will change the course of history – well, OK, his story, at least. Atticus pulls together a rag-tag bunch misfits – AHEM – a tough, brilliant crew, and sets out to wreak havoc – I mean – live a piratin’ life.
With little else to his name, Atticus has a taste for adventure, beauty and danger – where any minute might be your last, and your next minute could be your best ( … if only they could get off the dock).
“You crazy kids want to die tonight, is that the idea?”
After a poorly timed sore throat caused her to miss out on attending last year’s Mother’s Day massacre, Kelly Boone is preparing for her own Camp Crystal Lake slaycation. Jason Some random hunter wearing Jason’s mask killed her older brother in Book 1 and she’s ready to take action.
Unfortunately Jason isn’t the man behind the mask in this book either. I’m guessing he’s still hanging out in Hell; the first book appeared to take place sometime after Jason Goes to Hell in the Voorhees-verse timeline. Jason does have a very brief cameo of sorts in this book; it’s possible he was hallucinated by someone who’d lost a significant amount of blood but I’d prefer to believe it was him somehow briefly reanimated as mist. Since Jason is currently mostly unavailable we have yet another new hockey mask wearer.
So, who are potentially nearly departed?
Kelly Boone – Our hero with the tragic past. Now 18, Kelly has gone from captain of the varsity basketball team to someone who didn’t even apply for college. She has a lot of nightmares and migraines, and is depressed. When she’s not busy smoking she’s in the library researching Crystal Lake. She has a plan. She has a hunting knife. She should be a shoo in to survive. However, she is also the first person to suggest the group split up so my Horror 101 alarm bells are ringing. But someone has to survive, right?
“I mean, our whole lives are at stake, okay? In case you want some motivation.”
Doug Sanderson – Kelly’s boyfriend. This “cool and relaxed” 23 year old drives a beat up Volvo and consistently flunks courses at the local community college. Not the brightest of contestants, he’s a serial flirt and cheater so there’s no way he’s making it out of Crystal Lake alive.
Tina Chen – Miguel’s girlfriend. She’s 17, smart and planning on studying psychology at NYU. Her psychobabble and willingness to cheat on her boyfriend don’t bode well for her.
Miguel Hernandez – Tina’s boyfriend. He’s 18, works at a karate school and is excited to be going monster hunting. His martial arts training could potentially be useful but his annoying Beavis and Butthead impressions may make you wish hockey mask guy would shut him up. His arrogance may be his undoing:
“Actually, mister, we’re going to stick around, see, and kill Jason for you, since no one around here seems like they can do it themselves.”
Big Red – the man behind the mask. I felt for this 45 year old with the artificial leg, glass eye and permanent indentation in his bald head. He’s survived a bucketload of awfulness in his life and I probably would’ve still wanted to give him a hug while he was swinging a machete at me. It doesn’t matter how much I want him to be okay though. He’s the guy wearing the hockey mask. He’s toast!
Ma and Pa – Big Red’s parents. Depending on what their backstory is they probably have a 50/50 shot of surviving (at best).
Tuck – Pa’s drinking buddy who runs the fishing store. Horror 101 taught me that alcohol intake is usually enough to warrant a death scene so it’s probably not looking too promising for good ol’ Tuck.
Bud – Pa’s other drinking buddy. He has a son (Bud Junior), daughter-in-law (Jessie) and three grandkids, Cassie (6), James (4) and Little Billy (a baby). The adults are fair game but surely the children will live long enough to grow up to be adults that a new generation hockey mask killer can slaughter.
Darlene – The new waitress. She wears the name tag of the diner’s last waitress, who was previously sliced and diced. This doesn’t seem like a good omen.
Officer Donner – Law enforcement types don’t usually fare so well in slasher type encounters so I’m not holding my breath for this one.
This was a fun read but I didn’t get into the characters as much as I did in the first book. A lot of the death scenes took place off page and as I’ve already mentioned, Jason isn’t the slasher in this story so that was a let down.
Jason’s mask has some weird but kind of cool, leave-your-brain-disengaged powers. After donning the mask, Big Red’s glass eye begins to somehow show him scenes from the past, including one he would have been too young to remember himself. There’s also some unexplained magical connection between the hockey mask and Big Red’s artificial leg.
While I wanted to believe the hockey mask magic was possible, the story pretty much left me behind when Boone (Kelly’s brother), who came back as a sort of ghost, sort of corporeal evil dead guy, started helping out the hockey mask guy! I thought for a while that he may have been Kelly’s sleep deprived hallucination but he didn’t seem to be. Surely Kelly, who’d risked everything to avenge her brother’s death, deserved at least a “thanks for that, little sis” before Boone turned evil, if he absolutely had to.
Body count – 14 people and 1 grasshopper, if I’ve counted correctly. Most, but not all, of these deaths were orchestrated by our Jason wannabe.
Cover image: While this picture is cheesy horror fun, it doesn’t exactly line up with the story. None of our couples take a boat trip together, the guy in the hockey mask is supposed to be bald and wearing overalls, and even he would know better than to hang out in the lake, considering the abundance and size of the leeches that live there.
From the bizarre coincidences department: This book was my 169th read so far this year. The square root of 169 just so happens to be 13. Coincidence or X-File?!
I found the awesome artwork near the beginning of this review at dandingeroz.deviantart.com.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
Obsessed by the murder of her brother at Camp Crystal Lake, Kelly Boone sets out to put to rest forever the evil legacy of Jason Voorhees, but the curse is reawakened when a backwoods fisherman hooks a surprising catch, Jason’s hockey mask.
Family doesn’t exist, I told myself. Not for people like me, anyway.
Cari has spent her life being bounced from one foster home to the next, never staying in one place long enough for any to feel like family. Now sixteen, her latest placement is with Dawn and Jacky, an elderly couple from Ballybaile, Northern Ireland who are “seasoned God-botherers”.
Three months into this placement Robin Merrow, a boy from Cari’s school, goes missing. The local rumour mill is having a field day, particularly Jessica and “the God squad”.
Cari has been spending time with Jessica and her Youth Fellowship friends at the urging of her foster parents but she’d much rather be hanging out with Stevie B., Brains and Muff, who relieve some of Cari’s boredom with actual fun. Jessica’s friends were mostly interchangeable to me but I really liked Brains.
The people in the town seemed to forget all about Robin’s disappearance after a while and while I did eventually learn a summary of his story, none of its content was really dealt with. While several social themes are touched on in this book, most don’t get a great deal of page time, such as when a character suddenly blurted out something huge about their past.
The blurb is accurate to a point, although the book ended up veering off into an entirely unexpected direction. Had I had any indication that a major plot point would focus on the intersection between homosexuality and Christian faith I may have steered clear.
To be fair, some characters in this book are not judgemental and others are well intentioned but naive. However there are also those who wander into conversion therapy territory. Sadly these conversations are quite realistic; I have heard eerily similar accounts from friends whose churches attempted to ‘heal’ them of homosexuality. With a reasonable amount of this story taking place around church activities I enjoyed Cari’s perspective as an outsider.
I identified with Cari’s feelings about foster care and would have liked to have seen this explored further. Her foster mother, Dawn, is firm but caring and Jacky, her foster father, is essentially a teddy bear. I adored Jacky. Cari fairly consistently doesn’t come home when she’s supposed to and they know she’s not truly sorry when she apologises, yet they still decide they need to trust her more by converting the garage into an apartment for her. This didn’t ring true for me. Having had my own experience with a Christian foster family that were of the ‘do as I say, not as I do’ persuasion, I appreciated Dawn and Jacky’s genuineness, but they did seem too good to be true.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Atom, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3.5 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
‘Be nice to the majority of people and they won’t bother you much. Don’t get too involved. Have a laugh but keep your distance.’
These are the words 16-year-old Cariad lives by. She’s just been placed in yet another foster home, this time with an elderly Christian couple in a small town off the coast of Northern Ireland.
Cariad knows how to play this game. She’ll toe the line just enough that her new foster parents don’t ask what she gets up to when the sun goes down, just enough that they leave her alone. It’s easier that way.
But when a boy at school disappears – presumed dead – and no one seems to care, it really bothers her. Then one night out walking on the clifftops, she sees him and he asks her to keep his secret.
‘Don’t get too involved. Have a laugh but keep your distance.’
These are the words Cariad has lived by … until now.
Ezekiel is almost 15 and in ninth grade at Downy High School. His usual mood is one of “resentful loneliness”. The other kids have actively avoided him since the fifth grade because they think he’s a thief, although he isn’t. He actually has a micropower, which enables him to find things that are lost and return them to their owner.
It was as if he had been born with this mission in life: to see that all lost things were returned.
Beth is almost 14 but is in tenth grade and declares she’s “smart enough for college”. She tells Ezekiel she’s “a proportionate dwarf” and her height is referenced at every opportunity during the book, often in offensive ways. Beth is Ezekiel’s only friend.
Ezekiel’s micropower is of interest to Dr. Withunga, who runs the Group of Rare and Useless Talents (GRUT). The others in the group also have their own individual talents, which run the gamut from being able to make people yawn to knowing if someone’s belly button is an innie or an outie when they’re fully clothed. While these talents are used by the participants they’re not exactly lining up to save the world with them. These are micropowers, after all; there’s no one from DC or Marvel in sight.
Until Ezekiel is approached by a police officer with an unusual request. Help him find a missing girl. Except Ezekiel has never found a person before, only objects. Scrunchies appear to be a particular forte.
I was really excited to read this book. I love anything superhero related so figured anything even hinting at micro heroes would be right up my alley. I’ve had Ender’s Game on my TBR pile for years but this is my first Orson Scott Card read. I’m not sure if there’ll be a second.
I loved the concept and there were sections of this book I would have loved as a kid. I’m certain I would have spent considerable time figuring out what my micropower would/should be and I would have cheered Ezekiel on as he figured out what he was truly capable of.
Adult me is conflicted. I had trouble figuring out the audience for this book. The writing felt like I was reading a middle grade book but then very dark themes were introduced, which would be more suitable for older readers.
I found the reveals predictable and I didn’t like most of the characters. Ezekiel could be a semi thoughtful human being at times but when he was in “brat mode” I found him insufferable. Besides knowing which character had which micropower, the kids in GRUT were fairly interchangeable. No one had a distinct voice and practically everyone in this book was trying to out-snark each another.
While I usually enjoy banter it exhausted me here. Most of the characters spoke almost exclusively in sarcasm (I would usually love this) but there was a lot of dialogue that was mean, rude and offensive.
I wanted to throw my Kindle at the wall with the sentences that irritated me and needed to switch my brain into ‘don’t question this’ mode whenever law enforcement allowed children to be involved in their investigation. What police officer would allow a child to be involved in interviews? What police investigation includes a child wandering with the officers into unsecure locations where they expect to encounter the baddies, who probably have weapons?
Some conversations had me scratching my head:
“But that’s how scared I am, Dad. I’m just shaking. Like I’m freezing cold.”
“It’s going to be a chilly night, maybe under forty. It really is getting cold.”
Others infuriated me with their poor taste, even if they were intended to be sarcastic. A psychology professor calls Beth Ezekiel’s “companion animal” and doesn’t seem to understand why Beth can’t see the “joke”. I almost refused to keep reading because of the flippant use of ‘crazy’ and ‘insane’, like when Ezekiel “played the crazy-kid card”. And who thought this was a good sentence: Maybe almost getting killed and killing a guy yourself was a weight loss program that could really catch on.
Although it’s made clear that Beth has her own mind, and a very intelligent one at that, Ezekiel and her father both take it upon themselves to speak on her behalf towards the end of the book. At no time has she requested this. She even annoyed me at times. Even though I assumed this was sarcastic, when discussing who could own a lost toy cement mixer, she comes up with, “With a truck it has to be a boy.”
The trauma that Beth experiences is glossed over and there are unanswered questions, like which police officer/s were involved in the crimes.
Thank you so much to NetGalley and Blackstone Publishing for the opportunity to read this book.
⭐⭐⭐
Rating: 3 out of 5.
Once Upon a Blurb
“Are you really a thief?”
That’s the question that has haunted fourteen-year-old Ezekiel Blast all his life. But he’s not a thief, he just has a talent for finding things. Not a superpower – a micropower. Because what good is finding lost bicycles and hair scrunchies, especially when you return them to their owners and everyone thinks you must have stolen them in the first place?
If only there were some way to use Ezekiel’s micropower for good, to turn a curse into a blessing. His friend Beth thinks there must be, and so does a police detective investigating the disappearance of a little girl. When tragedy strikes, it’s up to Ezekiel to use his talent to find what matters most.
Master storyteller Orson Scott Card delivers a touching and funny, compelling and smart novel about growing up, harnessing your potential, and finding your place in the world, no matter how old you are.
Schizanthus Nerd 