Molly Brooks’s high-octane graphic novel charts the girls’ attempt to bioengineer a three-headed cat on their space station home.
#INKLING BOOK FULL#
Given the dearth of good stewards, it’s natural to envy the two best friends in SANITY & TALLULAH (Disney-Hyperion, 240 pp., $21.99 ages 8 to 12), who are blessed with full sets of parents. Indeed, Molly exists so purely to serve Cassandra’s hopes, Cassandra’s dreams, Cassandra’s future, that even mother and daughter are left wondering at book’s end: What does Molly want? Unlike Ethan, who struggles valiantly to not be his parents, Molly is her mother’s proxy.
But amid Healy’s whip-smart banter and well-hewed cameos (including appearances by several unsung female inventors), a thorny question takes hold. One by one, the clues point toward famous inventors - Alexander Graham Bell, Edison himself - which gives young readers a chance to meet and exonerate each one before the chase begins again. With the help of allies, including a Chinese boy named Emmett (“We don’t have the best reputation around here,” he sighs, fully aware of anti-immigrant sentiment), Molly tracks down the suspected assassins. After her father’s death, then, Molly quits school and becomes her mother’s assistant, refusing “to let her father become a liar.” Determined to showcase Cassandra’s flying contraption at the World Fair, only to be thwarted by the all-male Inventors’ Guild, Molly soon uncovers the dastardly plot of the title, a death machine targeting the entire city, which Molly and her mother must team up to defuse. Molly’s father is dead, but his ghost looms large: He had “promised his beloved Cassandra she would never have to give up on her dream” of rivaling Thomas Edison or Nikola Tesla. Yet Inkling has roared to life with a purpose, “a whole storm of feelings” congealed into a Rorschach blot, straight from Ethan’s father’s unconscious.Įthan’s father is known only as Dad, but in Christopher Healy’s A PERILOUS JOURNEY OF DANGER & MAYHEM: A DASTARDLY PLOT (Walden Pond Press, 384 pp., $16.99 ages 8 to 12), Mom has a name: Cassandra Pepper, a manic, stargazing inventor in 1883 New York, who seems to be less mother to her 12-year-old daughter, Molly, and more ball-and-chain. Ethan prizes Inkling like a golden goose: What if it could draw for both him and his father? All Ethan has to do is successfully parent it: feed it, nurture it, manage its volatile emotions. Enter Inkling, a splotch of ink that manifests from Ethan’s father sketchbook as a living embodiment of creativity, with the power to read, write and draw. Kids at school assume Ethan has inherited his father’s genius, begging him to draw on command, slipping him fan letters for his father and choosing him as the artist for a massive school project, based only on his dad’s fame - though Ethan alone knows his father hasn’t produced a single piece of work in two years. In Kenneth Oppel’s astonishing INKLING (Knopf, 272 pp., $17.99 ages 8 to 12), the death of Ethan’s mother leaves his artist father a zombie-walking “Coma Dad,” paralyzed by creative block.
But what happens when the parents are wayward and the child their rescuer? That’s the dilemma facing the heroes of four new novels. In tales of wayward children, parents are often a child’s best allies in cleaning up the mess.
0 kommentar(er)
