Angel and Bavar

September 1, 2018
In an everyday modern school, a girl who lost her parents to monsters meets a monstrously strange boy.Bavar's a friendless, "sallow" boy in an ordinary school. He has a powerful ability to avoid notice until he meets Angel, a new girl living with a foster family. Angel, who misses her dead parents constantly, sees through Bavar's reality-warping glamour to his uncanny reality: he's 7 feet tall with pointed teeth. Bavar, she discovers, lives in a gargoyle-adorned Gothic pile of a house where he fights massive winged beasts. Bavar's gruesome opponents, in fact, look exactly like the fell creatures who killed Angel's parents last year. Though Bavar wants to avoid the fate of all in his magical family--spending a lifetime battling the poison-clawed raksasa--Angel proposes a more permanent solution. In Bavar's sentient home, peopled by his loving aunt and uncle and the (both hair-raising and supportive) talking portraits of his ancestors, they seek answers. The growing humor and affection between these two awkward protagonists create an appealing contrast with the choppy, gloomy prose. Ham-handed Americanization of this novel (first published in England as A Far Away Magic) has left the setting a muddle, with American vocabulary inconsistently plunked into British-sounding sentences. Bavar and his family are white-appearing in their human guises; Angel is white.A solid friendship tale for fans of eerie fantasy. (Fantasy. 10-12)

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August 1, 2018
Grades 3-6 Two lonely kids team up to save humanity in Wilson's latest fantasy novel. After Angel's parents die, she struggles to fit into her new school and foster home. The wounded Angel is naturally drawn to Bavar, a seven-foot-tall boy who lives in a magical house where his raucous ancestors talk to him from paintings and bronze busts. Reluctant fighter Bavar is trained to protect humanity from monsters called raksasa, who enter the human world through a rift. As Angel is drawn into Bavar's world and learns that the raksasa had something to do with her parents' deaths, the two unlikely friends bond, heal, and try to close the rift forever. The sympathetic Angel and Bavar both deal with life-shattering tragedy, but Wilson's story is full of hope and spirit. Secondary adult characters are also sympathetic, especially Angel's foster mother, Mary. The chapters alternate between Angel's and Bavar's first-person narratives, which occasionally slows down the action, but the dual perspectives nicely show each character's journey toward recovery and understanding. An imaginative story about magic, friendship, and healing.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)

January 1, 2019
Bavar, a boy with a strange appearance, is the only line of defense against monsters from another world. He reluctantly accepts friendship from Angel; when it turns out she was orphaned by the creatures, they learn their stories are inextricably connected. With brief, alternating-perspective chapters and a brisk plot, the moody, Gothic ambiance of this "Beauty and the Beast"inspired tale never has time to settle.

(Copyright 2019 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)