Not Your Usual Day at the Beach: Roxie and the Hooligans at Buzzard's Roost by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor

Since Roxie's daring adventure foiled the bank robbers with the help of her town's notorious Hooligans, Roxie has hoped for a truce with that scruffy, ragtag gang of misfits.

But Roxie underestimates the Hooligans. Even when her Uncle Dangerfoot takes her and her bespectacled friend Norman along to his beach house, hoping to work on his hush-hush invention with his friend Lord Thistlebottom far from prying eyes and the press, they find a way to stowaway.

It was almost five hours later, and evening when they reached a large old house that sat back a bit from the ocean. Roxie and Norman were very stiff.

Uncle Dangerfoot reached for the latch on the trailer and opened the door. "What in thunder...?" he bellowed.

Roxie stared as Helvetia Hagus, Simon Surly, Freddy Filch, and Smoky Jo came tumbling out.

It seems as if Roxie cannot escape the Hooligans. Uncle Dangerfoot inexplicably accepts their story that their parents will not come to fetch them, and although the housekeeper and cook, Mrs. Tumbledry, is kindly, the other tenant, the Widow Bittersweet, veiled and gowned in heavy brown mourning garb, is scary weird. Rosie and Norman resolve to make the best of the uninvited guests, and Uncle Dangerfoot and Lord Thistlebottom seem totally absorbed in their secret invention... until the larcenous Helvetia, always on the lookout for a source of lucre, manages to swipe it.

The kids discover that the covert contraption is a rocket-powered jet pack, and Helvetia seizes the opportunity to try it out. Apparently the device is not quite ready for prime time, but Helvetia survives soaring above the beach, followed by a dive into the sand. The cat is out of the bag, and Uncle Dangerfoot is forced to explain the real purpose of his hideaway. He and Thistlebottom conceal their device in the Widow's baby's crib, where the petite Smoky Joe has elected to sleep, and, swathed in a baby blanket, she winds up being mistaken for the jet pack and kidnapped by the nefarious villain, Alfred Applejack.

Can Rosie and the remaining Hooligans combine forces to save Smokie Jo, or will she have to rescue them, in Phyllis Reynolds Naylor's second rip-roaring, harem scarem comic adventure, Roxie and the Hooligans at Buzzard's Roost (Atheneum Books, 2018).  In this series, Naylor's delightful ability to combine colorful and perilous adventures with picaresque humor is reminiscent of John Bellairs in his quaint and comic Gothic series which include The House with a Clock in Its Walls (Lewis Barnavelt) and his The Mummy, the Will, and the Crypt (Johnny Dixon). Naylor, Newbery Award winner for Shiloh (The Shiloh Quartet), never fails to delight and enthrall readers, and this easy reading adventure novel is just right for summer nights.

Take Me Out to the Ballgame: Derek Jeter Presents...Night At the Stadium by Phil Bildner

THE YANKEES WIN! "THAT WAS THE AWESOMEST GAME EVER!" GIDEON CHEERED.

TIME TO GET AUTOGRAPHS, DAD!" GIDEON LOVED AUTOGRAPHS, BUT ONE WAS STILL MISSING--THE ONE HE WANTED MORE THAN ANYTHNG.

"EVERYONE, STAY TOGETHER!" MOM SAID.

Giden follows his family, fumbling through his jacket pocket for his precious autograph book. But's it's GONE! He turns around to look behind him toward where he was sitting, but he hasn't dropped it there. And when he turns back around, his family is gone, too, out of sight in the crowd streaming toward the exits!

Gideon panics.

HE ZIGGED UP ONE RAMP AND DOWN ANOTHER.

"WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?" SAID A VOICE.

Everything looks strange, and the voice seems to be coming from a tangle of groundskeeping rakes and hoses in a corner.

"YOU TALK?" HE ASKED.

"WE ALL DO. SOME OF THEM TALK TOO MUCH," SAID THE HOSE.

Gideon feels as if he gone down that famous rabbit hole or through that looking glass. But he follows the directions from the talking rake and opens a door that says EQUIPMENT. Inside are some bossy yakking baseballs stacked in a pyramid. One of the bats hops into his hands, and in a wooden monotone croaks"Yer up, Kid!"

But Gideon isn't up to playing ball. Leaving the loquacious equipment behind, Gideon runs up some stairs, to where the food vendors' stocks are stored. He has to find his family!

THE HOT DOG SHOOK HIS BUNS, AND POINTED AHEAD.

"MONUMENT PARK!"

And inside the stadium's Monument Park Museum, it only gets stranger. Gideon meets Babe Ruth, who points his way to where Derek Jeter himself is waiting. Gideon gets his coveted autograph and directions to where he'll find his family from his idol himself, in Phil Bilder's takeoff on Night in the Museum, Derek Jeter Presents Night at the Stadium (Jeter Publishing) (Aladdin Books/Jeter Publishing, 2016). Fantasy-loving baseball fans will enjoy the inside tour of Yankee Stadium and get a chuckle or two from the wisecracking rakes and baseball bats in his latest of Jeter's baseball spinoffs. Jeter may inspire older readers of this one to move on to his popular semi-autobiographical boyhood baseball series, which includes Hit & Miss, (Jeter Publishing) The Contract, (Jeter Publishing) and his current hit (pun intended), Change Up. (Jeter Publishing)

FIRE!! I Survived the Great Chicago Fire, 1871 by Lauren Tarshis

"Amazing, isn't it?" said Mr. Morrow, smiling. "When I was born, Chicago was just a little town on the marsh. Today, Chicago is is one of the the most important cities in the world."

"It's beautiful," said Mama.

But suddenly Mama's expression darkened. "Does the sky look odd to you"" she asked, her brow wrinkling.

"Must be a fire," Mr. Morrow said matter-of-factly. "We're having fires practically every night now. The city is bone dry."

The word fire sent a flash of fear across Mama's face.

"Don't worry," Mr. Morrow said, giving Mama a reassuring pat. "Chicago has one of the best fire departments in the country."

Oscar had not wanted to leave their farm in Minnesota, the one Papa and Mama had worked so hard to build. But Papa was dead, and Mama had married Joseph Morrow. The farm was sold and the new family boarded the train to begin their new life together in Chicago. "We'll have dinner at the Palmer House, and the fire will be over before we finish supper," Joseph Morrow had said.

But when Oscar is separated from Mama and Mr. Morrow on the busy streets, Oscar finds himself alone as fire begin exploding all around him. Sparks rain down, burning his skin and threatening to set his clothes on fire, and the explosions spread like the prairie wildfire he remembers from Minnesota. Oscar comes to the aid of a little girl and her three-year-old brother and decides to try to find his parents in the reputedly fireproof Palmer House. But when they finally push their way through the terrified crowds on the streets, they find the Palmer House itself in flames.

A wall of fire roared down the street. The wind gusted, a hot and poisonous blast. A blazing sheet peeled off the fire. It swirled through the air, a flaming twister more horrifying than anything Oscar could have imagined. Oscar stood there, frozen in fear.

Then he heard someone calling his name.

Lauren Tarshis' newest, I Survived #11: I Survived the Great Chicago Fire, 1871 (Scholastic Press, 2015), continues her top-selling fiction series about young Americans who survive historical disasters. Tarshis's taut storytelling and well-researched detail put young readers right in the middle of this event, an epic moment in time that will keep even reluctant readers flying through its 96 pages as Oscar and his new step-father fight their way through the flaming streets and swim the burning river to escape the Great Fire. For readers who want more, such as the historical backstory of the Great Fire, the author provides a question-and-answer section and bibliographic references for further research, including Chicago's noted website on this event.

Other books in the historical fiction I Survived series include I Survived the Destruction of Pompeii, AD 79, I Survived the Sinking of the Titanic, 1912, I Survived #8: I Survived the Japanese Tsunami, 2011, and I Survived the Attacks of September 11th, 2001. (I Survived, Book 6)

Pigeon Peril: The Mesmer Menace (Gadgets & Gears) by Kersten Hamilton

WALTER'S HAIR WAS ALL STANDING ON END WHEN HE WOKE ME TO DEMONSTRATE HIS INVENTION.

"IT IS FINISHED, NOODLES," HE SAID, HOLDING UP A SMALL VEST WITH BAT-LIKE FOLDING WINGS.

I TRIED TO SHAKE THE SLEEP OUT OF MY EARS AS HE BUTTONED ME INTO IT.

"YOU'RE AMAZING!" WALLY SAID.

I WAGGED. THE WINGS FLAPPED UP AND DOWN!

"YOU CAN DO IT, BOY!"

MY WAGGER WENT WILD.  SUDDENLY, I CAME FULLY AWAKE TO FIND THAT I'D RISEN TO THE CEILING.

Dachshund Noodles believes that the problem is not with his loyalty, but his acrophobia.  I mean, not even a devoted dachshund can keep wagging when his wagger is all that keeps him aloft over an abyss!

But life is pleasant, if a bit wacky living with a family of eccentric inventors, until Wally Kinnewickett opens the door of the Automated Inn to a hobo and things take a turn for the outright bizarre.

"HOW CAN WE HELP YOU? " CALYPSO KINNEWICKETT ASKED THE HOBO KINDLY. "BREAKFAST, PERHAPS?"

"WE'VE NO TIME FOR THAT," THE HOBO SAID. HE TOOK OFF HIS COAT AND HAT.

WALLY GASPED. "THEODORE ROOSEVELT!"

MR. PRESIDENT!" OLIVER KINNEWICKETT EXCLAIMED. "WHAT AN UNEXPECTED HONOR!"

"THE COUNTRY NEEDS YOUR AMAZING BRAINS, KINNEWICKETTS," SAID THE PRESIDENT.

It seems a nefarious gang of magicians plan to use their powers to mesmerize the leaders of the country, gain mind control over them, and take over the nation, if not the world. T. R. urges Wally's parents, Calypso and Oliver, to turn their inventive minds to espionage to avert the coming catastrophe. The senior Kinnewicketts quickly pack and prepare to leave in disguise with the President, leaving Walter to manage their Atmospheric Electron Collector designed in collaboration with Nikola Tesla, aided by their staff of automatons, Gizmo the housekeeper, Knives the cook, and dozens of automated Dust Bunnies who keep the Automated Inn clean.

But no sooner do the President and his two new covert operatives disguise themselves and take the train to Washington, than the chief Mesmer of them all, in the form of the so-called Mr. Potts and his mustachioed assistant Mr. Slade, arrive at the Inn, pretending to be pop corn purveyors visiting to view Mrs. Kinnewickett's invention, the surplus electron corn popper.

But with them comes a peculiar pigeon, Iron Claw, who has one spinning eye capable of mesmerizing anyone who gazes at it. Wally soon sees through the ruse and invents for himself some special spectacles impervious to the pigeon's stare, while everyone else falls under its spell, even Wally's supercilious cousins Prissy and Melvin and the entire automatonic staff.  Wally realizes that he must get word to the telegraph office asking Mrs. Roosevelt to contact his parents to return and foil the plot, but with Potts and Slade watching his every move, the young Kinnewickett realizes that his only hope lies in Wally's wag-powered wings to carry the message to the town telegraph office. It's all up to Noodles' wagger to power his flight, but can a dachshund hampered by a deathly fear of heights manage a long flight and a sustained wag?

Kersten Hamilton's first in a projected series, The Mesmer Menace: Gadgets and Gears, Book One (Clarion Books, 2013), has all the trappings of sci fi fantasy adventure, a  pair of evil magicians, a family of famed wacky inventors who put the kabash on evil while perfecting an unlimited (and carbon-emission-free) source of electricity to power the world.  Wally is the quintessential kid genius inventor, and his dachshund Noodles is the, er, dogged narrator of this comedic introduction to the quirky Kinnewicketts for young readers who like their fantasy on the spoofy side.

"Steampunk with training wheels for the chapter-book set!" quips Kirkus Reviews.

Playwrights, Spies, and Cryptic Engravings: Tower of the Five Orders by Deron R. Hicks

Julian slid the drawing across the table to Colophon. "It's a perfect copy of the crest on the inkwell."

She placed the drawing in the middle of the table. The image appeared to be a crest or coat of arms. It was in the shape of a shield: a bird and flowers.

"This could take a few weeks," Julian warned. "We need to get a copy of Pimbley's Dictionary of Heraldry, and there are several registries for ancient coats of arms. We may have to look at hundreds--maybe thousands...."

"Or," said Colophon, "we can Google it."

The search came back with about 3,940,000 results.

"Well, that should narrow it down a bit," said Julian.

A knock on the library door interrupted their discussion. Meg Letterford walked in carrying a tray of sandwiches.

"Thanks, Mom," said Colophon.

Meg placed the tray on the table beside the drawing. "Dare I ask what you're doing?"

Julian and Colophon looked at each other. "Well," said Colophon, "it's complicated."

"As long as it doesn't lead to another dangerous underground crypt, then I'm okay with it." Mom shot a look at Julian.  "Oh, one last thing," she said. Meg pointed at Julian's drawing. "I've spent time at Cambridge University and I'm certain that's the crest of Corpus Christi College."

In Deron Hicks' first book, Secrets of Shakespeare's Grave: The Shakespeare Mysteries, Book 1 (Letterford Mysteries,) twelve-year-old Colophon and her older cousin Julian had sleuthed out the cryptic clues to uncover a portfolio of unknown Shakespearean writings, thereby saving Letterford and Sons Publishing from a hostile takeover by the mendacious and unethical cousin Treemont Letterford. Colophon's father Mull Letterford had believed that his family's 400-year-old publishing house was safe in his hands for his generation. Stymied for the moment, however, Treemont Letterford wastes no time sinking the family fortunes and business by blackmailing "Shakespearean "experts" to declare the writings a certain forgery, sinking the venerable company's profits and allowing him to take over the business and the Manchester, Georgia, mansion of the American Letterford clan.

Defeated, the bookishly-named siblings, Colophon and her brother Case, prepare to leave the Letterford estate and move with their parents to London, into the old Letterford house. But Colophon remembers Julian's prediction that their findings, Shakespeare's lost portfolio and an old glass inkwell, might well be clues themselves to the storied treasure of their ancestor Miles Letterford. Examining the old inkwell which had sat for some time on her bookshelf, Colophon discerns through the tarnished top an inkling of markings that indeed seem to be leading them to additional clues at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge.

With the Bohemian Julian as her adult escort, Colophon follows the secret ciphers through the old buildings of Cambridge with many a close call until they manage to snitch Christopher Marlowe's Matriculation Quill from under the nose of its curmudgeonly Keeper. Decoding its engraved symbols leads the intrepid Colophon and Julian back into "another dangerous underground crypt" just as her mother had feared, this time following the long-bricked-over Fleet River through London's ancient sewers toward a secret room with Letterford's storied treasure inside.

Occasionally Colophon would catch a glimpse of sunlight filtering down through a drain. But for the most part, their journey was dark and cold. An entire city lay just above her head, she knew, yet she had never felt more isolated from the rest of the world. The air felt stale and undisturbed. And she could hear things. Things that scraped, skittered, and scratched just outside the beam of her flashlight.

But as the two cousins discover when they approach the hidden door, they are not the only Letterfords who have cracked the family code.

Deron Hicks' delightfully arcane mystery, Tower of the Five Orders: The Shakespeare Mysteries, Book 2 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013) finds the courageous Colophon, her scholarly cousin Julian, and her technologically savvy brother Case again matching wits with the greedy and wicked Treemont to retain the ownership of Letterford and Sons. In settings which vary from wooded estate in Georgia to modern London and the hidden Elizabethan world in which the founder Miles Letterford and his friends Marlow and Shakespeare lived, this second of the Letterford Mysteries succeeds in continuing the deliciously shadowy and cryptic adventures of Colophon, a girl sleuth with one foot in the modern world and one foot in the sixteenth-century as she follows the dormant clues left for her by her esteemed ancestor. For readers who love arcane ciphers, centuries-old libraries, and dimly-lit stone caverns in a literary storyline, pair this one with its predecessor (see my 2012 review here) for some fine reading for a dark autumnal night.

True to its literary ambiance, Deron Hicks' appendix provides the neologisms, Shakespeare's own invented words, which head up each chapter, with a thumbnail quote from their sources in the plays, from As You Like It through The Tempest, and includes its own antique colophon, or publisher's mark and identification.

Jack On The Road: From Norvelt to Nowhere by Jack Gantos

"You don't want to flatten me," Bunny Hoffer warned, "'cause I have some incredible news."

"Another Russian sneak attack?" I asked.

"Better than that," she cried out.

"Well, don't just stand there like a lawn gnome," Miss Volker snapped, referring to Bunny's stumpy size. "Spit it out!"

"Well," she boldly announced with a flourish. "Private sources tell me that a very old lady named Mrs. Custer at house E-19 has returned to town. And you know what that means."

"Do tell me," Miss Volker replied with disdain.

"It means," Bunny explained slowly, calculating the impact of her point, "that you are no longer the last standing original old Norvelter in Norvelt."

It's Halloween afternoon, the Cuban missile crisis is in full swing, and the little town of Norvelt has barely recovered from the murder of all but one of its  ancient founding ladies. Only Miss Volker remains, given a lifetime charge by the town's founder Eleanor Roosevelt to be local coroner and obituary writer.   Although  she and Jack, a.k.a. The Grim Reaper, complete with scythe and the latest detective skills, haf traced the old-lady murders to Mr. Spizz, who vanished before justice could be served, it seems Mrs. Volker is not out of a job after all. When a long-forgotten Norvelt expatriate, Mrs. Custer, returns to her old house, she, too, is dispatched by a Halloween cookie laced with the same poison that killed the others.

Jack, costumed for Halloween as Mr. Spizz and sporting a  schnozz just like Spizz's (sculpted from cadaver-wax by Bunny, the undertaker's daughter), witnesses Mrs. Custer nibbling the tainted Girl Scout cookie and falls under suspicion from the local police,  but  Jack and Miss. Volker are sure that the murderer is Spizz, with a peculiarly romantic motive.  More than a half-century ago, Miss Volker swore to  Spizz that she would only marry him when she was the last founding lady alive,  and now, with the sudden death of the newly-returned Mrs. Custer, she is convinced that Spizz has again resorted to murder to force her into keeping her promise of matrimony.

But with a new mystery to resolve, Volker's spunk returns after its brief funk. With the zeal of her idol, Eleanor Roosevelt, in her eyes, she proclaims that she and Jack have a special mission:

"A great moment of clarity has saved me.  I'm going to track down that thick-skulled white whale and then I'm going to kill him.  I'll be his Captain Ahab."

"But didn't Moby Dick kill Ahab?" I suggested delicately because she was so worked up.

"Not in my version," she squalled. "In my version I'm Mrs. Captain Ahab and I jam my ivory peg leg right down Moby Dick's blowhole.  Sometimes it takes a woman to get the job done properly." She gave me a severe look that squelched what I was about to say.

"Don't you dare feel bad for wanting to knock off Spizz," she commanded.  "He deserves Old Testament justice--an eye for and eye and a tooth for a tooth."

So Miss Volker sets out on quest that out road-trips anything  Hollywood has to offer, with twelve-year-old Jack at the wheel of a battered VW Beetle with "Runs Great" painted on the windshield and Miss Volker armed with a pistol and a harpoon with a length of rope attached, in a chase story with as many plot twists as the rocky road to Rugby, Tennessee.  The seemingly deranged Volker tracks the elusive Spizz from Eleanor Roosevelt's fresh grave at Hyde Park to Miss Volker's childhood home in the Utopian English village of Rugby, Tennessee, to the swamps of south Florida. But there is a steely and sane method behind Volker's madness, and at the end of their mission, the dearly departed rise from their caskets, the real murderer and his plot to destroy Norvelt are outed, and true love conquers all, in Jack Gantos' long-awaited,  wildly wacky, comic, and dead serious sequel to his Newbery Award-winning  Dead End in Norvelt (see review here).

In that review I said, "Gantos' novels are like no other, filled with drop-dead wacky fun, seemingly chaotic, but somehow pulling themselves together brilliantly, like kaleidoscope glass which suddenly falls into a meaningful and beautiful pattern as it turns. Serious and hilarious, fast-paced yet reflective, untidy but emerging as solid coming-of-age story, this novel easily takes its place within Gantos' formidable body of work." Those words equally describe the just-published From Norvelt to Nowhere (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2013), a not-to-be-missed novel for Gantos fans and all middle readers who like an out-of-the-box read that revels in and reveals the Jekyll-and-Hyde dichotomy of the human personality.

"Gantos’s sequel to his Newbery-winning Dead End in Norvelt offers less history, more murder, and another hefty helping of zaniness," says Publishers Weekly succinctly.

Fleeced! Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters: The Movie, based on the book by Rick Riordan

This second movie in the Percy Jackson series begins with a flashback exposition that reenacts Percy's arrival at Camp Half-Blood, in which the four new campers, Percy, Grover, Annabeth, and Thalia are attacked and Thalia martyrs herself to save the others.

With that out of the way, moviegoers learn that things at Camp Half-Blood are not so godly these days either.

It seems that Luke, the runaway renegade camper, now plans to revive his grandfather Kronos and destroy the gods of Olympus. To nullify any opposition from the demigod campers, he has managed to poison the Thalia tree and thereby breach her protective shield around the camp.

Percy, believing that he is the last demigod standing, the last child of the big three, Poseidon, Zeus, and Hades, feels that it is his duty to mount a quest for the Golden Fleece, the only talisman that will reverse the poisoning of the Thalia tree which protects the camp. Chiron and Dionysus, however, choose the take-no-prisoners, daughter of Ares Clarisse for the official Quest. Just before she departs, the campers are rescued from a steampunk bull, and meet a benign interloper,  Thyson, who turns out to be Percy's Cyclopian half-brother, also a son of Poseidon, who despite being challenged in the binocular vision department, is played with bumbling sweetness and charm by newcomer, Douglas Smith.

Having consulted the Oracle, Percy believes his fate is to save Olympus or die, so, with his allies--Grover and Annabeth, and the new-found Thyson--he sets out on his own quest. After a wild Taxi of Desolation ride (shades of Harry and Ron's Anglia Ford ), the three locate Hermes (cleverly employed as a crack UPS manager), who give them a thermos of the winds and a hand-held package sealing dispenser that can make things disappear to speed their mission, and after a cool ride on a CGI-created giant sea horse, Hippocampus, (the cleverest of the fantasy beasts here), the seekers board a ship under the control of Luke Castellan, where they undergo many tests of their prowess before they finally claim the Golden Fleece, vanquish Kronos, and return to Camp Half-Blood in time to restore the Thalia tree--and shortly thereafter the real Thalia--to life as well.

Touches of teen/adult-friendly humor lighten the tale, as in the scene in which the Percy and his allies meet up with Clarisse in a ship crewed by lurching zombie sailors (they had to work them into the story somehow).  One undead sailor responds to Clarisse's orders with a snappy "Aye-Aye, Captain," and then turns to the one-eyed Thyson, and deadpans, "Oops. Sorry, sir!" Oh, and poor cursed Dionysus is still hoping that when he pours a glass of his vintage wine, it won't turn into water, grumbling that that Christian guy gets to turn water into wine.

Although some of the monster encounters are intended to be frightful, the comic book nature of the action somehow renders all those CGI creations fairly non-scary and suitable for all but the most impressionable of elementary-age viewers. As with the first movie, kids unfamiliar with the actual book will find it suitable summer movie fare, with the requisite monster-a-minute formula that seems to appeal to middle graders.

With Chris Columbus (who directed the early Harry Potter movies), again involved, the parallels with the Potter stories are as evident as in the first movie, Riordan's The Lightning Thief, with the pleasant addition of Percy's well-meaning but befuddled Cyclopean half-brother, (also a son of Poseidon) Thyson, who, like Dobby, dies protecting his hero.  Unlike Dobby,  in a fortunate oversight by Lucas and his assorted monsters, Thyson is allowed to fall into a rampaging subterranean river and, apropos of a water god's son, revived to quest again.

I won't reiterate the compromises required by the screenplay's edits of Riordan's book: for those still pertinent criticisms, see my 2010 review here. My focus group for this movie was one now-fourteen-year-old (the ten-year-old critic cited in the review of first movie) who has long since read all the books, and a fourteen-year-old and eleven-year-old who had not read any of them. The non-readers liked the movie. The more sophisticated reader summed it all up well: "It was an okay movie, I guess, but it was NOTHING like the book! Read it!"

Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters is rated PG for fantasy violence. For a preview of what the action sequences include, see the movie trailer here.

And if the movie inspires a desire to read the books, Rick Riordan's still popular tweener series includes The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 1), The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson & the Olympians) The Titan's Curse (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 3), The Battle of the Labyrinth (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 4), and The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book 5), all ably written and still top-selling fantasies which may also motivate some boning up on Greek mythology as well. At the rate of one movie every three years, current kids have plenty of time to get the whole series read before Book 3 hits the screen. Sadly, at this rate my original ten-year-old co-critic will be well into his twenties before the last one comes out. But maybe, after four year of high school and four years of college, he can write that review.

Endangered Species: Never Say Genius (The Genius Files) by Dan Gutman



One good yank and Pepsi’s glass tube toppled over too, with the same result. She was spitting out ice cream. Coke rushed to untie her and noticed her skin had turned a pale blue. He looked around frantically for something to warm her up.

“Quick! Rub this all over yourself.”

“What is it?”

“Hot fudge."

The hot fudge felt so good on his skin that Coke covered himself with the stuff too. Soon their body temperatures were rising and they were feeling almost normal again. They stepped over the broken glass carefully and ran out of the Mister Softee truck.
They ran into a shallow pool of water at the end of a log flume ride and jumped in.

Mr. And Mrs. McDonald spotted them in the distance.

“What happened to you two?” Mrs. McDonald said.

“We were kidnapped by an evil Mister Softee,” Coke explained. “He tried to induce
hypothermia by covering our bodies with ice cream."

“Ha, ha!” Dr. McDonald said. “That’s a good one. You kids crack me
up!”

It’s a family vacation trip from coast to coast, as the McDonalds head for a July 4 wedding of the kids’ long-lost Aunt Judy on the Mall in Washington, D.C., Professor McDonald hopes a historic site will give him an idea for his next book, and Mrs. McDonald just wants to find offbeat tourist traps for her Amazing But True blog, but thirteen-year old twins Coke and Pepsi just want to survive.

Unknown to their perennially clueless parents, Pep and Coke were recruited as part of the secret Genius mission, in which the smartest kids in American were brought together to cure he nation’s problems, but somehow their mentor Dr. Warsaw has turned rogue and has been trying to kill them all the way to Wisconsin. Pep and Coke had thought they’d finished him off in the first book, The Genius Files: Mission Unstoppable, only to find that he’s been replaced by Archie Clone, a red-haired teenager who looks amazingly like the comic book character, but is on an evil mission to kill off all the genius kids and keep their stipends for himself.

Between having majorly boring days visiting such iconic shrines as the world’s largest concrete egg, the Duct Tape Museum, the Hoover Historical Center (which turns out to be a museum of vacuum cleaners, to the dismay of Dr. McDonald, who is considering President Hoover as his next book subject), the site of the first McDonald’s fast food shop, (where Archie Clone attempts to French-fry the twins in a reality display) the World’s Largest Pants and The World’s Largest Shoe Museums,
and missing the World’s Largest Hairball Center, by only a, well, hair, the McDonald parents make their way merrily along all the minor highways headed east, as Pep deciphers messages everywhere left behind by Archie Clone, his sidekick Mrs. Higgins (formerly the twins’ teacher), and a bunch of gumbahs nicknamed Bowler Dudes for their Derby hats. For his part, Coke provides arcane bits of knowledge which occasionally come in handy as the twins avoid assassination at Wrigley Field, Cedar Point, and the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, where fittingly Mrs. Higgins tries to kill them off with mega-loud speakers blasting Megadeth tracks.

And when finally the kids confront Archie Clone just as he attempts to drop them from his helicopter onto the spiky lightning rods atop the Washington Monument, Pep and Coke think they have it made at last, with nothing worse ahead but suffering through a day in their uncomfortable Sunday-best getups at the wedding. But in Dan Gutman’s second book in the Genius Files series, The Genius Files #2: Never Say Genius (Harper, 2012), there is no rest for kid geniuses on the way to the successful completion of their mission. Gutman, the winner of at least eighteen children’s choice state awards, knows how to keep kids laughing through wacky adventures with whacked-out villains and hairbreadth escapes that keep those pages turning at a fast clip and make them eager for the next installment in the series. As Kirkus Reviews concurs, "... the author brings his confused but resourceful youngsters to an explosive climax and a shocking revelation that guarantees further adventures on the road back to the left coast. Nothing spices up a boring road trip like moments of extreme terror.

Gutman is the best-selling author of many top-selling, kid-pleasing series, which manage to interweave a lot of historical and scientific information into their comic plots, including The Baseball Card Adventures and My Weird School Daze and state award winners such as The Million Dollar Shot and The Homework Machine. Gutman's latest non-fiction offering, which bravely goes where no kid's author has gone before, is Election!: A Kid's Guide to Picking Our President (2012 Edition).

Key to the Past: The Whites of Their Eyes (Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers of the School) by Andrew Clements

Robert held up his index finger. "Important tactical rule: always plan for mistakes and malfunctions--it's called redundancy."

He took another bite of cheeseburger and kept talking. "When you consider a weapon design, you also have to consider your enemy. In this case, we've got Lyman the Spyman--except he can't just hang around the school spying all day. To maintain his cover, he has to actually be the janitor. So, that's his weakness--as you already know. And really, in today's action, I was sort of copying what Ben did."

Ben nodded wisely. It was nice to have his work praised by an expert

"Okay, okay," Jill said. "Let's hear about this fake puke of yours."

A pair of elderly women in the next booth swiveled their heads and stared at Jill disapprovingly.

In the third book in the popular Keepers of the School series, The Whites of Their Eyes (Benjamin Pratt and the Keepers of the School) (Atheneum Books, 2012), with time running out, Benjamin Pratt and his friend Jill decide to risk taking on a third co-conspirator, the "brain" Robert Gerritt, to help them defeat the corporation and its undercover agent, Lyman, masquerading as the new school janitor, who plan to tear down the historic Duncan Oakes School and build a mega-theme park, Tall Ships Ahoy, on the site. Ben had uncovered a secret society of generations of students, called The Keepers of the School, sworn to protect and perpetuate the school. Now, with only three weeks before the wrecking ball destroys the historic building, the two Keepers decide to swear in Robert to help them outwit the former secret agent Lyman, now employed by the Tall Ships Ahoy Corporation to foil their efforts.

In the introductory volume of the series (see my review here) Ben and Jill have followed Duncan Oakes' cryptic messages and uncovered a codicil in his will which could possibly defeat the demolition plan, but they need more facts to use as firepower, and the search for more concealed clues is foiled by "Lyman the Spyman" who seems to always be one step ahead of them. With Robert's help, the three manage to defeat Lyman's hidden sensors and enter the school for a midnight search which uncovers a banister which, when turned, reveals a secret panel which opens into a concealed room which was evidently used as a station on the Underground Railroad.

The three Keepers hope this this historic find will help win over public opinion to preserve the Oakes School, but when the kids emerge from their hidden room, they find themselves facing a fierce guard dog which Lyman has set loose in the schools halls, and again they must outwit Lyman to make their escape with proof of their new find.

Andrew Clements' third book in the series does not disappoint middle readers in its combination of suspense, danger, and a tantalizing historical mystery with local political ramifications. Clements, a master of elementary fiction, is a fine storyteller who offers a fast-paced page turner with deeper ethical ramifications. Fans of the first book and its sequel, Fear Itself, will want to get their hands on this latest installment in the series.

Trail to Jail? The Dunderheads Behind Barsl by Paul Fleischman

When school ended, we thought we were done with our teacher, Miss Breakbone, forever.

I thought summer would be boring.

I thought I'd never see the inside of a jail cell.

Wrong. Wrong again, and very wrong.

Maybe the Dunderheads shouldn't call me "Einstein" at all.

Christened "Dunderheads" by the evil taskmistress and sadistic teacher Miss Breakbone for their inability to meet her exacting standards, a group of unusual students, each with their own peculiar, and shall we say, non-academic talents, the Dunderheads are ready for their idea of a leisurely and rewarding summer.

But when their movie-mad member, nicknamed "Hollywood," talks the group into signing up as extras for the movie being shot on location in their town, starring teen diva, Ashley Throb-Hart, the would-be Dunderhead actors discover, to their dismay, that Mrs. Breakbone has also auditioned for a bit part. And then, when a series of cat burglaries occur around town, the spiteful Miss Breakbone fingers one of their group, "Spider," whom she knows can hold his own with Spiderman's climbing skills. With Spider behind bars, awaiting trial, the rest of the Dunderheads--Wheels, Nails, Spitball, Google-Eyes, Clips, Junkyard, and Pencil--hatch a byzantine plan involving their wacky abilities for helping Spider out of the hoosegow and, they hope, flummox Miss Breakbone and her brother, Chief-of-Police Breakbone, in the process.

The sequel to Newberry Award-winning Paul Fleishman's earlier The Dunderheads,, also illustrated by the able David Roberts in his own inimitable style, has opened to rave reviews among the critics. Funny, fast-moving, and respectful to those kids with eccentric and often unappreciated abilities, The Dunderheads Behind Bars (Candlewick, 2012) is cut from the same inventive storytelling cloth as Paul Fleishman's award-winning The Whipping Boy.

"Fleischman and Roberts work in perfect synch to deliver a noirish mystery that’s as delightfully eccentric as the kids themselves," declares Publishers Weekly.

Artful Dodging: Outlaw by Stephen Davies

"What's with the hugging?" said Kas. "I haven't seen you hug Dad since you were, like four years old."

"But this time there was a very good reason for hugging." Jake took his right hand out of his pocket and jangled the keys to his father's motorcycle.

Kas' eyes widened. "Who do you think you are? The Artful Dodger? What are you going to do with those?"

"Isn't it obvious? I'm going to warn Yakuuba."

"You don't know where the camp is."

"Yes I do. Remember when I charged my phone in the grass hut? No phone signal, but the GPS worked just fine."

"You got a fix!" cried Kas. "I suppose you think you're clever."

"Above average, yes."

"You're an OUTLAW," said Kas.

How does a fifteen-year old boarding school boy find himself in a terrorist camp on the edge of the Sahara, trying to fend off a Predator drone Hellfire missile attack against an outlaw who is actually the good guy foiling an international plot to control the gold industry in Burkino Faso?

Well might you ask.

When Jake Knight is caught in a schoolboy game of midnight "geothimble," (a high-tech amalgam of "Who's Got the Thimble" and geocaching), trying to break in to Britain's Leeds Prison, he finds himself summarily suspended from his stolid prep school and shipped off on the first plane to Burkino Faso, where his father is British ambassador. Jake is fine with that: he prefers life in the exotic and happily hazardous scene in Ouagadougou to the bog of boredom at Waltham College.

And for adventure Jake is in the right place at the right time. On his second day there, at a glittering diplomatic dinner with gold-encrusted desserts, Jake and his sister Kas are kidnapped, thrown in the back of a yellow bouillion cube delivery van and hauled deep into the Sahelian back country by a ruthless band who plan to ransom the two by force the exchange of their young Brit hostages for political prisoners. Jake manages to keep his trusty smart phone hidden and contact his father briefly from the back of the van, enabling the police to track his position, but it seems nothing in Burkino Faso's politics is quite what it seems. Their kidnappers are indeed impostors, their leader pretending to be the noted ecoterrorist Yakuuba Sor, a misstep which draws the real Yakuuba, a.k.a., The Chameleon, to disguise himself and "rescue" the two for his own questionable purposes.

But the Police Commissioner Beogo, seemingly working with the British MI5 agent and Jake's dad to find them, is himself part of a conspiracy to gain control of the country's lucrative gold mining industry, actually working at dangerous cross purposes which threaten Jake's and Kas' lives, and when the real Yokuuba at last succeeds in returning the two to the embassy, he becomes the target of the ruthless MI5 double agent Dexter and his co-conspirators. Missiles are programmed to destroy Yakuuba as soon as he returns to his camp, and Jake realizes that only he can stop this injustice.

Stephen Davies' forthcoming Outlaw (Clarion, 2011) is a rip-roaring, romping-stomping, over-the-top adventure story in the venerable tradition of Dime Novel boy heroes.

Davies equips his protagonist with a plenitude of physicality, such as "wall-walking," a technique of impressive climbing which enables him to top ten-foot walls with a single bound, and an array of cunning high-tech skills, including charging his smart phone with a combination of full-fat goat milk and a flashlight battery and diverting missile strikes with flares.

Arrayed against Jake are also formidable forces, including a rogue secret agent's top gadget, the HI-MEMS (Hybrid Insect-Micro-Electro-Mechanical-System), a bio-cyborg beetle which tracks Jake and Yakuuba wherever they go. Add in Jake's wise-cracking, eye-rolling thirteen-year-old sister Kas who rises to the occasion and a Robin-Hood-like illusionist desert ecoterrorist out to outdo all the diverse bad guys, and we have a whale of a politico-thriller cum adventure story laced with whimsical Brit humor and suitably bad-guy villains with non-stop action from first page to last.

Author Davies, himself a resident of Burkino Faso, provides plenty of Francophone local color and characters to set this one apart from the usual picaresque tale of adolescent derring-do and his inconclusive conclusion leaves the story open to further sequels for the armchair adventurer's reading pleasure. A really good read for 'tweener thriller fans.

Perry Stormaire's Night Out: Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick by Joe Schreiber

If you had one day left to live, how would you spend it and why? (University of Southern California essay prompt)

I could see over the edge now, looking down. "I'm not jumping!" I shouted.

"Then you will die."

I nodded to the gaping hole in the forty-seventh floor. "How is this not dying?"

Gobi gave me another nudge toward the edge and for a second I actually felt the vacuum of space itself sucking me outward.

Outside the building, a high-pitched turbine whine thundered up into view and that was when I saw the helicopter.

"Get ready!" Gobi shouted. The helicopter tilted toward us, lowering.

Gobi grabbed me and jumped.

Not since Ferris Beuhler took a senior skip day or Tom Cruise's Joel borrowed his dad's Porsche for a day of Risky Business has a high school senior had such a fantasy fugue as good kid Perry Stormaire, whose big night out as unwilling prom escort for his family's nerdy Lithuanian exchange student turns into the wildest chase script ever.

It's the worst prom date fix-up in history. Gobi, smudged glasses and all, appears, dressed for the date, in a heavy brown wool peasant costume, carrying a huge matching canvas purse. "Is traditional Lithuanian ceremonial costume," Gobi explains, as Perry cringes in his rented tux.

But Gobi persuades Perry that what she really wants is not a spin around the dance floor, but a whirl around New York City, and soon the terminally dorky Gobi morphs into the hottest ninja chick of them all, one on a mission to avenge her sister's death at the hands of five human traffickers, all of whom are in New York on that one night. From a nightmare date in a peasant costume to a stiletto-heeled, gun and knife-toting assassin babe, Gobi is an action figure come alive to shake up Perry's pedestrian sojourn on the waitlist at Columbia on the road to recapitulating his father's life.

Dodging bullets (and catching a few), Perry and Gobi careen through midnight Manhattan streets in his dad's Jaguar, outrunning thugs and escaping various slaughter scenes--even one with a rampant bear. Gobi's quick weapon-wielding secret agent moves finish off three of her hotlisted honor killings, but the last two come hard, and the two are captured, held in chains in a basement in Brooklyn, finally escaping only to end up in Perry's father's office, where, just ahead of the police SWAT team, Gobi finds her final target, the head of his father's law firm herself.

By the time Joe Schrieber's forthcoming Au Revoir, Crazy European Chick (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) concludes with a blast, one which flattens the Stormaire house and implodes Perry's plans for an unruffled transition to adult life, the reader is cheering for Gobi and rejoicing in Perry's metamorphosis into a guy finally taking his fate into his own hands. Schreiber gleefully juxtaposes top-tier college application essay prompts as chapter heads with the kaleidoscope of experiences hurtling toward the reader and giving the initially predictably prosaic Perry a radically new world view, one in his old life is literally and figuratively blown away, and he sees that there are many possible lives ahead of him. It's quite a ride, one that is hard to put down, as fast-paced as a car chase down Broadway, a serio-comic joyride of a novel that will leave readers waiting to exhale.

Separate Peace: The Betrayal of Maggie Blair by Elizabeth Laird

I thought I had left danger behind when I'd fled the Isle of Bute, but I seemed to have leaped from the cauldron into the fire. In Rothesay they'd wanted to string me up for being in league with the Devil, but here in Kilmacolm you could be hanged for trying to be too close to God.

Why can't I be just ordinary? I wanted to cry out loud. Why does all this happen to me?

When her ill-tempered Granny, the midwife and herbal healer for Scalpsie Bay, is stopped from using folk medicine on a sickly newborn, her warnings are taken as curses and when the child dies, his well-to-do parents accuse her of witchcraft, a capital crime in late 17th century Scotland. Sixteen-year-old orphaned Maggie Blair is also accused by the false testimony of the farmer's servant girl Annie, and only survives by the craftiness of old Tam, her Granny's scoundrel drinking companion, who gets the jailer drunk and helps her escape the island and the gallows which claim her grandmother.

Journeying many miles on foot, Maggie finally arrives at the comfortable farm of her only living relative, her father's brother Hugh Blair in Kilmacolm. Maggie is taken in, warmly by her uncle but grudgingly by his wife, who is appalled at Maggie's upbringing by her wild and slovenly Granny. But Maggie works hard, learning to read and perform the necessary household tasks, and slowly her love grows for her adopted family.

But even this relative comfort has its perils. This is "the Killing Time," in Britain, and the Blairs are staunch Covenanters, strict Calvinists whose compact has defied King Charles II's attempts to dominate them through the re-establishment of the Church of England in Scotland, and their penchant for worshiping with a renegade preacher rather than in the King's church lead to violence and ultimately her uncle's capture and imminent execution in Edinburgh.

As her uncle's family faces persecution and starvation at home, Maggie determines that she must travel to Edinburgh with gold borrowed from a sympathetic laird and attempt to buy back her uncle's freedom. Maggie enlists the loyal Tam to guide her through the dangers of the countryside, filled with local thieves and roaming soldiers for whom young girls are fair game. Thieving, begging, snaring rabbits, and staying with old confederates along the way, Tam uses his ability to charm listeners by playing his pipes to get inside the castle where two hundred Covenanters are held in the dungeon/ With a job in the kitchen, Maggie watches for her chance to help her uncle go free, not knowing whether he will unbend his desire to martyr himself even for a chance to return to his family if that chance arises.

A five-time nominee for Britain's Carnegie Award, author Katharine Laird's forthcoming The Betrayal of Maggie Blair (Houghton Mifflin, 2011) is a page-turning adventure story, an engrossing bit of historical fiction, and a coming-of-age journey for her courageous Maggie, whose instincts struggle with the hard and unforgiving religion of her adopted family, so well contrasted by the flawed kindness she finds in the outcast Tam and others whose instinctive goodness she comes to see as the true path to her own faith.

This is a remarkable novel, told by a master craftsman of the storytelling art, with historical setting and detail intrinsically interwoven with the plot. But the chief glory of The Betrayal of Maggie Blair is in its characters, unforgettable, fallible humans caught up in the religious hatred, superstition, and greed of their own time, who nevertheless 4 rise above and go beyond their setting to shape their lives for the good. As School Library Journal's reviewer says, This is a beautifully crafted novel to be savored for its symbolic language, historical atmosphere, and vivid characters.