Bound To Stay Bound

Booklist - 04/15/2020 *Starred Review* Preteens from a world where science is an everyday thing and magic the stuff of fantasy (i.e., ours) find themselves tasked with saving a parallel one where the exact opposite is true. Though the spells that the aspirationally named Modesty finds in a mysterious notebook only work for select minutes each day and bear disappointingly mundane titles like To Gather Lost Coins and To Open a Door, they turn out to be surprisingly useful: she and classmates Calvin and Drew open a portal in her refrigerator to wintry Congroo, which is threatened by catastrophe because something is rapidly draining the raw magic that powers its weather and other spells. Worse yet, the dragons that produce said magic are starving to death because the cold has killed their food. The leak turns out to be embedded by a Congroo schemer in his programming for a fantastically popular 3D printer that transforms tomato juice into fresh vegetables. Perhaps the printer’s inventor can be persuaded to give up his multibillion-dollar business? Right. Tongue firmly in cheek, Clark propels his squabbling eco-crusaders through a rush of misadventures that test their credibility as well as ingenuity on the way to a confrontation with an oddly familiar villain who loudly dismisses the climate change as “fake news. Another romp from the author of What We Found in the Sofa and How it Saved the World (2013). - Copyright 2020 Booklist.

Booklist - 04/15/2020 - Copyright 2020 Booklist.