Robert’s brother Matthew disappears one day on his walk from the family farm into town. Soon more children are disappearing, and a new man moves into town. Abram quickly gains the respect and loyalty of almost everyone in town – especially the adults, who are quick to believe that his rain machine can bring the rain they need to their Depression era Saskatchewan. Robert, however, has many misgivings. Especially after he’s had dreams about butterflies luring him away the same night that two other children go missing.

As none of the grown-ups will believe a child his age about his misgivings about Abram, Robert sets out to find out what has happened to his brother and the other missing children – only to discover that Abram’s collection of butterflies is more than just butterflies, but are the souls of the children that have gone missing.

Oh gosh. I found this book disturbing. So creepy. More creepy than Neil Gaiman’s Coraline, and a lot of people were way creeped out by that book. And yet I needed to know what happened in it, how things turned out, what happened with Abram and all of the missing kids… I think the creepy thing was how Abram was able to completely bewitch the adults, make them only think about things they want, make them spend all their time in daydreams, and make them forget all about the missing children. Even Robert’s parents forgot that Matthew had disappeared – at one point they were convinced that he wasn’t missing, that he was just visiting his grandparents and would be back soon, but at other points it was as if he never even existed.

Normally I love books where children are the heroes and are able to succeed and save the day where parents were never able to. But this one was way too creepy for me to be able to fully enjoy as I would have hoped to.

Though, that said, it is so great to see Canadian authors coming out with books of this caliber. As far as scifi for children and young adults goes, the story of this one was so much more vivid than others I’ve read recently (such as Westerfeld’s Uglies series).

Bottom Line: I still love Arthur Slade’s stuff, but this was my least favourite of the ones I’ve read so far. That said, it was still fabulous, it was just so creepy and really left me disturbed.

Think Godzilla meets Battlestar Galactica. Or Cloverfield meets Terminator. It’s monster vs machine, and the world is totally depending on the monster to save the earth from total annihilation.

Tim, Defender of the Earth is not your average monster story. Action-packed from the beginning, Tim is the story of a top-secret military experiment – Tyrannosaurus: Improved Model. When government funding on this particular military experiment gets cut and the British Prime Minister orders Tim’s death, Tim escapes from the top secret military facility. Once escaped, he learns exactly how much this tiny little world needs saving.

Professor Mallahide, the head scientist of another top-secret military experiment, specializes in nanobots. When he experiments on himself, and becomes nothing more than part of the swarm of nanobots, he is determined to bring the human race to their next step in the evolutionary process (or so he believes) by turning everyone into a mass of nanobots with him.

Fifteen-year-old Chris is more concerned with being cool than he is with the state of the world, but when he is chosen as the one person who can help Tim defeat what has become of Professor Mallahide, he has to decide whether to join the world or to turn his back on Tim and the rest of humanity.

I loved every second of this book! It was so much fun. There wasn’t a boring moment – not even at the very beginning when things are just getting started. It puts a totally different spin on the classic monster story, showing through the monster’s eyes what it must be like to be that big and to be considered a terror to people.

Tim is one of the most adorable dinosaurs I’ve ever watched or read, and I totally want to keep him as a pet. Totally. His loyalty towards the earth, and his determination to protect it at all costs was so touching. I do wish that Enthoven had written more interaction between Chris and Tim, as those were some of my favourite parts to read. There is VERY little of that in the book, sadly. It would have been nice to see that developed a little bit more.

I didn’t particularly care as much for Professor Mallahide as I would have liked to. He seemed more like a little kid looking for approval than he did a villain trying to force his perceived “better world” on the rest of humanity, but it gave an interesting spin to things when you saw him talking to his daughter. He just didn’t come across as very … villainous. (Let’s just say that he did NOT get a PhD in horribleness.)

Overall, though, fabulous book! I would highly recommend it to anyone who loves monster movies.

Siblings Tony and Tia have always known that they weren’t normal human beings, even though neither could remember where exactly they came from. They’ve always had to hide their “special powers” – they can communicate telepathically, Tony can manipulate things with telekinesis, and Tia can unlock doors and communicate with animals.

When their guardian suddenly dies, Tony and Tia are shipped off to an orphanage, where they meet a man who claims to be their uncle and have legal guardianship over them. Both kids know that not only is this man not related to them in any way, but also that he only wants to harm them. In order to avoid this and in order to discover exactly who they are, they escape from the orphanage one night and begin a dangerous journey to Witch Mountain, following clues that Tia had just discovered that their real uncle left them.

I vaguely remember watching and enjoying the Escape to Witch Mountain movies when I was a kid; hearing that Disney was going to make a third remake of the adaptation of the book spurned me on to mooch and read this book. It was a cute book, though at times it seemed a little too convenient how Tia and Tony would suddenly remember something about themselves at the exact right point in time to help them out of a bad situation. I suppose, however, that for the age group this was written for, that it was the best way to go about learning about the kids and where they came from.

The novel starts with Tony and Tia only knowing that they aren’t like anyone else on earth and that they probably come from another world:

For a moment, as he stood there, he wondered again about the world they had come from, and if they would ever find it. In what direction it lay, or how one got there, he hadn’t the slightest idea.

“Maybe,” Tia had once said, “all we have to do is climb a certain stairway, or go around a strange corner – and there it’ll be.”

“Just like that,” he’d said, laughing.

“Why not?” she’d insisted. “We know the kind of place it is. It’s full of magic and music – for that’s the only kind of place we could have come from. So why wouldn’t we have to find it sort of magically?”

Maybe it didn’t exactly make sense, the way Tia had put it, but he was sure of one thing. Considering how unlike other people they were, it was the only kind of world they could have come from – so it must be somewhere.

By the end of the novel, they have remembered their journey from Hungary to America when the spaceship that took them to earth in the first place crashed, why they were trying to get to America and what happened to the planet they came from, and people who helped and trying to hurt them when they first came to earth. So it just came across as slightly too convenient.

That said, however, it was a fun book. Cute, and definitely something I would’ve loved reading when I was quite a bit younger.