A promising first offer in a series that offers plenty of appeal for middle-grade and middle school readers.
Sent to spend the summer with a mad-scientist uncle in California, 11-year-old twins Nick and Tesla explore a mysterious, no-longer-abandoned mansion with gadgets they invent and readers can build.
In this fast-paced adventure in which the twins inadvertently foil a kidnapping, there are further mysteries: Why is that black SUV following them, and just what are their parents doing in Uzbekistan? There’s danger lurking: a pair of Rottweiler guard dogs, a neighbor girl who stands in the window with a sign that says “Go Away,” and two men who don’t want intruders. Their uncle’s lab, with its “Keep Out” sign, is full of intriguing and useful—if possibly explosive—material. Tesla is a girl with guts and good ideas; Nick is equally clever but more cautious. The instructions for making a rocket launcher, a robo-cat, a semi-invisible nighttime van tracker, an alarm and an electromagnet are clear and the diagrams helpful. Opportunities for humor abound, especially in the character of the distracted inventor uncle, first seen covered with sticky orange slime. Art includes circuit board plans and circuit diagrams; pencil illustrations show the twins and their friends, DeMarco and Silas. A sequel, Nick and Tesla’s Robot Army Rampage, is scheduled for 2014.
A promising first offer in a series that offers plenty of appeal for middle-grade and middle school readers. (Adventure. 9-13)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59474-648-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Charming, poignant, and thoughtfully woven.
An aspiring scientist and a budding artist become friends and help each other with dream projects.
Unfolding in mid-1980s Sacramento, California, this story stars 12-year-olds Rosalind and Benjamin as first-person narrators in alternating chapters. Ro’s father, a fellow space buff, was killed by a drunk driver; the rocket they were working on together lies unfinished in her closet. As for Benji, not only has his best friend, Amir, moved away, but the comic book holding the clue for locating his dad is also missing. Along with their profound personal losses, the protagonists share a fixation with the universe’s intriguing potential: Ro decides to complete the rocket and hopes to launch mementos of her father into outer space while Benji’s conviction that aliens and UFOs are real compels his imagination and creativity as an artist. An accident in science class triggers a chain of events forcing Benji and Ro, who is new to the school, to interact and unintentionally learn each other’s secrets. They resolve to find Benji’s dad—a famous comic-book artist—and partner to finish Ro’s rocket for the science fair. Together, they overcome technical, scheduling, and geographical challenges. Readers will be drawn in by amusing and fantastical elements in the comic book theme, high emotional stakes that arouse sympathy, and well-drawn character development as the protagonists navigate life lessons around grief, patience, self-advocacy, and standing up for others. Ro is biracial (Chinese/White); Benji is White.
Charming, poignant, and thoughtfully woven. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-300888-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Never didactic, these poems interweave music, programming, family drama, and middle school as interconnected parts of Emmy’s...
A 12-year-old whose dreams of musicianship are shattered discovers a passion for code.
Emmy’s lonely at her new San Francisco school. When her pianist dad got a dream job at the symphony, the family moved from Wisconsin—her mom’s opera career is portable—but Emmy’s miserable. Devastated she doesn’t have the talent to follow in her parents’ footsteps, she ends up in computer club instead of choir. And it’s there, learning Java, that Emmy makes friends with Abigail—and discovers that coding gives her a joy she’d believed came only from music. Free-verse chapters are conventional at first, drawing poetic structures from musical metaphors. But as Emmy learns Java, the language and structure of programming seep into her poems. Music and code interweave (one poem presents Emmy and Abigail’s pair-programming as a musical duet). Typeface changes have myriad effects: showcasing software and musical terms, mirroring the way formatting helps programmers understand software, and reflecting Emmy’s emotional state. As she becomes more comfortable in her own skin, she grows aware of the many traumas that affect her family, classmates, and teachers, and readers will cheer to see them work collectively—like an orchestra or like software developers—to create something beautiful. Characters’ races are unspecified, but on the cover Emmy presents white and Abigail (whose braids are referred to repeatedly) as black.
Never didactic, these poems interweave music, programming, family drama, and middle school as interconnected parts of Emmy’s life. (glossary) (Verse fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-358-04082-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Versify/HMH
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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