Holman (Secret City, U.S.A., 1990, etc.) weaves a terrific story about the nature of reality, honoring the past, and the experience of loss, set in the California of 1932. Colly's mother died in a car accident the year before; his father is a movie stuntman, and everything Colly knows he learned from the movies and from being on the set. When his dad is injured in a stunt, they go to stay in an adobe house in the desert to heal, where Colly meets Benjamin Grey Fox, a retired professor, and his nephew, Ozro, who aren't at all like ``Hollywood Indians.'' Set in italics and alternating with Colly's story is one of a Cahuilla boy, Sparrow, and his grandmother, who see white settlers approaching in 1774. Colly's movie view of the past and Sparrow's history intersect in dreams, in talismans, in animal spirits. How Colly lays both his sorrow and Sparrow's to rest is told in language that dips and soars like the flight of an eagle, carrying readers along with their need to know what happens. While Holman occasionally preaches about the legitimate rights of the First Nations, the bits of movie lore, gorgeous desert descriptions, and deeply moving final scenes amply compensate. (Fiction. 9-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-689-80772-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1997
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
Ebulliently original.
Who can't love a story about a Nigerian-American 12-year-old with albinism who discovers latent magical abilities and saves the world?
Sunny lives in Nigeria after spending the first nine years of her life in New York. She can't play soccer with the boys because, as she says, "being albino made the sun my enemy," and she has only enemies at school. When a boy in her class, Orlu, rescues her from a beating, Sunny is drawn in to a magical world she's never known existed. Sunny, it seems, is a Leopard person, one of the magical folk who live in a world mostly populated by ignorant Lambs. Now she spends the day in mundane Lamb school and sneaks out at night to learn magic with her cadre of Leopard friends: a handsome American bad boy, an arrogant girl who is Orlu’s childhood friend and Orlu himself. Though Sunny's initiative is thin—she is pushed into most of her choices by her friends and by Leopard adults—the worldbuilding for Leopard society is stellar, packed with details that will enthrall readers bored with the same old magical worlds. Meanwhile, those looking for a touch of the familiar will find it in Sunny's biggest victories, which are entirely non-magical (the detailed dynamism of Sunny's soccer match is more thrilling than her magical world saving).
Ebulliently original. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: April 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-01196-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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