Matthew Loux

Prunella's village has a demagogue who is exhorting the humans to build a second wall atop their existing wall to keep out the surrounding monsters. So, yeah, bad time for Prunella to inadvertently put on a cursed ring that changes her to an animated skeleton.

Banished to live with the other monsters of the island, she soon finds out there may be someone on a distant mountain who may have a solution to removing the cursed ring, so it's quest time! Prunella meets, challenges, befriends and show more learns about monsters on her journey to finding the way back to where she belongs.

A rollicking, fun and friendly adventure that makes me immediately want another Prunella book. show less

(Full disclosure: I received a free e-ARC for review through Netgalley.)

Young Prunella lives with her mom in a small village. Though they're on an island teeming with natural beauty, sentient creatures, and magic, you wouldn't know it - Prunella's community is walled off from the forest, the mountains, and the beaches. And there's a rumble to build the wall even higher, as fears of monster attacks spread throughout the town.

In the midst of this panic, Prunella find a mysterious ring while show more tending to her backyard garden. When she puts in on, she's transformed into a skeleton. Horrified, her fellow citizens mistake her for a "real" monster and promptly banish her from the village.

And so Prunella goes on a quest to break the curse of the skull ring. Along the way, she gets to know the "monsters" with whom she shares the island - skeletons, dragons, giants, stone megaliths, wisps, even the great cat sphinx who guards the island and its inhabitants - and discovers that they possess more humanity than the humans in her village.

PRUNELLA AND THE CURSED SKULL RING is an absolutely adorable and compassionate story, perfect for readers of all ages. The narrative has some pretty obvious real world parallels (all the "build this wall" talk gave me flashbacks to 2016!), making it an excellent way to introduce young readers to concepts like othering, prejudice, and the like. The artwork is charming AF, from the giant proudly introducing Prunella and Captain Rip Skeleton to their miniature home, to Prunella's entry into Cedarton. I wondered - not with a little apprehension - how Loux would wrap up the story, and the ending does not disappoint (a little bit snarky, with nary a whiff of eye-rollingly unrealistic optimism). show less

Summary: Delia Bean loves science and museums and exploring -- all of which means she doesn't exactly fit in at her high school. Her parents take her to visit her Uncle Lyndon, and when she's exploring the woods near her house, she stumbles across a huge museum, with artifacts from across Earth's history. But this is not just any museum - it exists outside of time, and its employees regularly time travel to collect research and artifacts for the museum. Her Uncle Lyndon is actually from the show more year 5079, he's the founder of the museum, and he thinks Delia would be perfect for one of the Museum's rare internships. But to land the position, she'll have to compete in increasingly difficult trials against five other teenagers, including Michiko, a Japanese girl from the 2200s; Dex, a Neanderthal boy ("one of the smart ones"); Marius, who is still not used to people calling his time "Ancient" Rome; Reggie, a robotics expert; and Greer, a snobby Scottish girl who is already familiar with time travel and determined to win the intern position.

Review: I really, really enjoyed this book; this is exactly what I'm hoping to find every time I pick up a graphic novel at random off my library's shelves. The story was fun and funny and exciting and action-packed and well-suited to the medium, with well-developed characters and good dialogue to boot. There were a few parts of the story that I wish we'd gotten more detail - we don't see or hear from Delia's parents after the first few pages, for example, and while I get that's not the point of the story, it still seemed odd to me that they'd just disappear completely, leaving their school-aged daughter to be a time traveler. There were also a few places where either the writing or the lettering left out critical punctuation, making me read a sentence a few times before I figured out what was going on. (One example was "It is never our place to change the timeline be it directly or through our own negligence!", but there was a line break between "be" and "it", so the lack of a comma between "timeline" and "be" left me going "change the timeline be? what?".) But really, these are minor quibbles. The story is a lot of fun, and the art is bright and colorful and just a little goofy with the over-exaggerated expressions and I just loved it. The book ends with its storyline nicely wrapped up, but leaving open the definite possibility of a sequel, which I will happily devour as soon as it's out. 4.5 out of 5 stars.

Recommendation: The sensibility and the style of this book remind me of a mash-up of Raina Telgemeier, Faith Erin Hicks, and Foiled. If you like any of their books, or like fun, silly time-travel stories (after I'd already checked this out from the library at random I saw it on a list of "Books to read if you like Doctor Who"), this is definitely worth checking out. show less

I dutifully bought Loux's earlier, acclaimed series Salt Water Taffy years ago, but honestly was never really a fan and neither were my readers. So I postponed reading this for quite a while. When I finally did, I realized instantly what I had been missing.

The story opens with a mysterious adventure by strange men in goggles, tyrannosaurs, and mysterious technology. It quickly snaps back to the current day and science enthusiast Delia Beetle. She's determined to have a great summer of show more visiting museums and studying science, even though her best friend doesn't share her enthusiasms. Fortunately, they're visiting her favorite relative, Uncle Lyndon, and his remarkable house with plenty to explore and document. In fact, she discovers even more than she expected when she finds her uncle's Earth Time Museum, an amazing place that includes artifacts across time and space. Even better, her uncle tells her she has a chance at getting a prestigious internship! Delia can't think of anything she'd rather do and she even likes her competitors; her roommate Michiko Odo, tech-genius Reggie, Titus from the Roman Empire, and Dex (he's one of the smart neanderthals). Delia isn't so sure about self-confident Greer, but after some wild adventures they're all great friends. Or are they? When things go wrong and Delia messes up, will her new friends ever trust her again? Do any of them have a chance at getting the internship - or saving the world?

Loux' art shows a world of cinematically skinny kids and adults, all with explosive energy, flying hair, and engaging grins. There's not much diversity, especially for a story covering a huge variety of times, and the characters stick pretty firmly to Western culture. However, the backgrounds have some diverse characters and there's no worries about Delia leading the group despite her gender and her emotional reactions to messing up.

Despite the drawbacks, it's an exciting science fiction adventure with last-minute choices, different personalities learning to work together, and plenty of tense moments of action. My favorite part was the genuine depiction of the warm friendship that grows between Delia and Michiko which is treated as an important part of the story. The robot librarian and her robot cats are pretty cute too.

Verdict: This is a new adventure that will grab the interests of a wide range of readers. Recommended.

ISBN: 9781596438491; Published 2017 by First Second; Borrowed from another library in my consortium; Purchased for the library show less