From School Library Journal
Grade 2–5—Isaacs, who cleverly conjured up a fearless Tennessee woodswoman in
Swamp Angel (Dutton, 1994), once again devises a tale of exaggeration and slapstick. The heroine this time is Estrella, a lightning-fast runner who is also a natural-born animal healer. She cares for three outlandish creatures: Kickle Snifter, a strong-as-an-elephant lamb; Sidehill Wowser, a horse look-alike with downhill legs twice the length of its uphill ones; and Comet, a bouncing Rubberado puppy. Incensed when they are stolen, Estrella tracks them north to California Gold Rush country, where an old miner, after sharing a tall tale or two, sends her on to Luckless Gulch. There, she discovers that treacherous ghosts have petrified everything in ice and are viciously using her pets to mine their gold. In a blast of ingenuity, Estrella races around the underground chamber "lighting the room with brilliant streaks of flame," ultimately scaring off the ghosts and saving her critters and the miners. A few too many plot strands crowd the text-heavy story, possibly confounding less-than-able readers. Nevertheless, the laugh-filled distortions on every page keep pace with this feisty heroine's laudable determination to make things right. Although at times Santat's images struggle with the text for space on the page, the illustrations, rendered in acrylic and ink and touched up in Adobe Photoshop, capture the story's spirit, and the ghosts are particularly, and delightfully, ghoulish.—
Barbara Elleman, Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Amherst, MA Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
As she did with Swamp Angel (1994), a Caldecott Honor Book, Isaacs transforms an industrious heroine into a larger-than-life figure in this great, loping, original tall tale. Estrella Rivera, who lives on her father Primo’s rancho in 1848 California, can run faster than the wind, igniting the air around her in a trail of flames. But speed isn’t her only gift. She has a rare, healing touch with animals, and she soon finds herself with an odd menagerie of fanciful pets. When a group of ghostly gold miners kidnaps her beloved brood, planning to put them to work underground, Estrella races to the rescue. Isaacs has the tall tale down, and she keeps a complex story moving with a galloping pace and uproarious descriptions. Santat escalates the fun, stretching his saturated, stylized acrylic paintings into dynamic compositions. At 48 text-rich pages, this tale may be too tall for bustling preschool groups. But older children will enjoy a walloping good story that is filled with metaphors. Grades K-3. --Thom Barthelmess
