Blast from the North

June 1, 2016
Art-loving cave lad Lug again saves his clan (and several others too) from the twin menaces of climate change and bad guys.As if the arrival of snow and saber-toothed tigers in series opener Dawn of the Ice Age (2014) weren't upsetting enough, here comes a mountain of ice moving with suspicious speed and precision toward the homes of the Macrauchenia Rider and Boar Rider clans. Riding out atop friendly mammoth Woolly to investigate, Lug and pals find both a glacier riddled with tunnels and Blast, a weirdly white-skinned frozen boy who, when thawed out, offers the glacier as a mobile shelter for the threatened locals. But the sight of exiled thug Bonehead working with Blast hints that all is not as it seems--and indeed, the whole setup turns out to be an ongoing scheme to rob prehistoric communities of their livestock. Can Lug stop Blast and his cronies (and the glacier), free the captive villagers imprisoned at the mountain's bottom, and maybe even rescue the cub that Blast has kidnapped to keep the resident polar bears in line? Natch! By the end all's made right, he's found a new friend in equally artistic Boaga (described as "dark-skinned" with "frizzy black hair and almond-shaped eyes"), and even lost at least some of his pathological fear of animals. Gerardi dresses modern-looking kids in crude furs for the cartoon illustrations. Stone-cold predictable but with enough silliness to keep sliding along. (Fantasy. 9-11)

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