![]() In her fiction debut, the author reveals a gift for creating compact, vivid character portraits, yet whenever the plot shows signs of taking off, she marches it back to the kitchen. After they insist she drop the audition, Anjali hatches a plan with her best friend, Linc, to go to the audition instead. ![]() Her Trinidadian-immigrant parents want Anjali to take the Stuyvesant High School entrance exam, which happens to coincide with the audition. When she’s chosen to audition for Super Chef Kids on the Food Network, she has a chance to make her dream come true, but there’s a problem. When not at school, taking cooking classes or working in her family’s roti shop in Queens, Anjali, 13, dreams of becoming the Food Network’s youngest chef. Readers with strong stomachs and a taste for melodramatic narratives bedizened with words like “tenebrous” and “mephitic” will devour this yarn with relish. Strewing her narrative with dark hints, obscure clues, assorted lunatics and, in particular, both macabre cuisine and a panoply of noxious or tantalizingly evocative odors, the author contrives a highly atmospheric experience. ![]() Higgins trots Rex himself out to the misty island, where he is befriended by a deaf, young freak-show contortionist, nearly falls under the spell of a hypnotic con artist out to harvest the diamonds scattered thickly on the lake’s bottom and uncovers a number of hideous secrets on the way to a climax that brings just deserts for some and tragic twists of fate for others. Young Rex discovers this when his father is confined to the Asylum after suddenly going mad and eating his own hand-to the open glee of Rex’s sinister new stepmother Acantha Grammaticus. The prosperous town of Oppum Oppidulum, the deep and cold adjacent Lake Beluarum and the Asylum for the Peculiar and Bizarre that sits on an island in said lake all hold horrifying secrets. More luridly gothic deeds and schemes, set near the locales of the author’s Eyeball Collector (2009), Bone Magician (2008) and Black Book of Secrets (2007). This first installment in a proposed trilogy is absolutely un-put-down-able, more exciting than an X-Box and roller coaster combined. ![]() Can they get past the naval blockade? Can they survive the sky-borne attack on the blockade? Whom can they trust? Who-or what-is SYLO? And who is fighting whom? MacHale knows boy readers and delivers, giving them an action-packed plot with a likable, Everykid protagonist and doling out answers with just the right amount of parsimony to keep the pages turning. Tucker and Tori need to get to the mainland to tell their story. There’s no communication from the mainland to the island and no way to get word of what’s happening out to the world. The country-club golf course has been converted into a military camp run by a division of the military they’ve never heard of: SYLO. The girl he wants to get to know a whole lot better, Tori, is captured along with Tucker and imprisoned behind barbed wire. Navy, things start to fall apart, and Tucker can’t stand aside for long. But when the island is quarantined by the U.S. For now, warming the bench at the weekly football games is just fine with him. ![]() He likes life on tiny, fictional Pemberwick Island, Maine, and hopes to take over his father’s landscaping business eventually. While his friends talk about going out into the world and doing great things, he prefers to dream small. This riveting novel starts with a question: How safe is it to remain uninvolved?Īt 14, Tucker Pierce is all about fitting in and going with the flow. ![]()
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