A culturally tone deaf exercise in narcissism.
Opening with a flash-forward teaser, this unpersuasive debut quickly fizzles.
The only home Luchi Ann, 13, has known is the women’s prison in northern Thailand where she was born to a jailed American mother who supervised her impressive education (history, philosophy, art, calculus and languages). After her mother dies, blonde Luchi Ann sets off alone, with the kindly warden’s blessing, to “search for answers” to the mystery of her mother’s incarceration. (Why she doesn’t just ask the warden is another mystery.) Carrying her mother’s ashes, money and a few phone numbers but little else, she accepts a ride to Bangkok with the warden’s nephew. Like the plot, Luchi Ann never achieves credibility. Puzzlingly, she neither confides in nor seeks help from sympathetic adults in Thailand. They, for their part, neither question her nor intervene to protect her. Luchi Ann’s sensibility and breathless present-tense narration, with pauses to rhapsodize about her future, belong more to an entitled girl of privilege than an orphan child adrift in an alien world. Reduced to generic, travel-brochure descriptions of countryside and city, vibrant Thailand feels drably insubstantial, the literary equivalent of an exotic background for a fashion-magazine spread. Equally generic are the Thai characters, enablers on Luchi Ann’s self-absorbed journey.
A culturally tone deaf exercise in narcissism. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8027-2297-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Pleasant, but it’s all been done before.
City girl or farm girl, which will Taylor choose to be? Or does she have a choice?
Twelve-year-old Taylor’s parents have uprooted her from her perfectly comfortable life in Minneapolis and planted her on a farm to raise chickens, ducks, goats and sheep. She takes on many responsibilities and chores, all presenting their own levels of grossness, and manages, mostly, to attack them with ingenuity, determination and some hilarity. But she describes herself as thoroughly discombobulated as she tries to adjust to a new school and this new, alien way of life. Unable to voice her unhappiness to her parents, she plots to sabotage her school grades and behavior to get their attention, and convince them to return to the city. Taylor tells her own story with humor and honesty, as she comes to terms with the changes in her environment and in herself. The peripheral characters are not as well drawn, however, especially her parents, who seem to make precipitous, impulsive, life-changing decisions with good intentions but little else. The other children are one dimensional as well; there’s a manipulative town girl, a teasing, irritating boy and a kindhearted farm girl. Only Taylor’s engaging, breezy narration lifts the whole above the banal.
Pleasant, but it’s all been done before. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7614-5827-2
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
A stronger-than-she-realizes heroine uses her disconcerting telepathic gifts to help others and heal herself in this...
After moving to a rural Australian town, Sasha’s unwelcome premonitions lead her to solve a string of art thefts while tackling her own issues.
Ever since her mum left, Sasha’s “life has turned into a huge, weird disaster area.” The sad, anxious Sasha knows her dad’s trying hard to hold the family together. When he accepts a police job in Manna Creek to “make a new life,” Sasha decides she’ll give “moving to the back of nowhere” a chance, just to make him happy. Unimpressed with the drab town, the bedraggled house behind the police station and the hostile locals who resent the new cop’s kids, Sasha and younger brother Nicky explore with their new pet police dog, King. Sasha’s freaked out when she finds that she and King can communicate telepathically and even more upset when she starts dreaming about local people, past and present, who are about to die. Is there something wrong with her? Should she tell her father or repress everything? In an authentic first-person voice, Sasha fumes at her missing mum, reacts negatively to Manna Creek, supports her father and brother and conveys her fears about her telepathic powers as she leads the tense, fast-moving plot to resolution.
A stronger-than-she-realizes heroine uses her disconcerting telepathic gifts to help others and heal herself in this satisfying adventure. (Paranormal adventure. 11-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-61067-063-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Kane Miller
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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