The family conflicts of LaFaye’s turbulent debut, Year of the Sawdust Man (1998), head toward resolution in this bustling, lightweight, far-fetched sequel. In the two years since her mother, Heirah Rae took off to find something better than her claustrophobic small-town life, Nissa has neither forgiven her, nor warmed to her father’s new wife, Lara. Then Heirah Rae resurfaces, with an invitation to join her in Chicago. After an internal struggle and with her father’s very reluctant consent, Nissa goes. LaFaye fills the Depression-era story with events—parties, pregnancies, puberty (along with a standard-issue onset-of-menses scene, with all its attending panic), Nissa’s first taste of city life and her first exposure to live theater, heart-to-heart conversations, tense confrontations, and fence- mending; all of the characters, from a coterie of vicious gossips to Nissa’s idealized parents—one wise, earthy, and quiet, the other flamboyant, outrageous, and artistically gifted—larger than life. For such lean times, money for food and travel flows smoothly, while people talk about pregnancy in chatty, modern, informal terms. The patchy ending is more of a collapsed epilogue, or a separately written short story, in which Nissa returns to Louisiana to organize a public library and, finding her town’s racial divide too deep to span, ends up building two. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-689-82610-9
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A teenager suffers through her parents’ separation in this smoothly stylized, if conventional, debut. Aurora’s world comes crashing down when she catches her artist father nuzzling a model. Rory, a talented artist herself, furiously burns her sketchbook; suddenly he’s gone, leaving Rory and her mother wallowing in teary guilt, sending back a letter with lines that infuriate: “one day you’ll understand,” and “someday, when you’re older . . . “ Rory stops all painting and drawing, and curls up around the hurt, stonewalling even her best friend, Nicky. Rory’s almost continual awareness of light and color gives her a convincing artist’s voice, and Mack sets her back on her feet in the end, with the help of time, Nicky’s loyalty, and a startling gift from her father: her charred sketchbook, rescued and repaired both as a sign of his love, and to remind her to believe in herself. Psychological insight here is but skin deep, and the characters play it pretty close to type, but readers may be affected by the story’s overall emotional intensity. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-439-11202-8
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Patneaude (The Last Man’s Reward, 1996, etc.) hatches a silly plot and one-dimensional characters, but preteens might enjoy this piece of escapist entertainment about a boy wrongly committed to a mental asylum. Peter’s weak-willed mother has lied to him all his life about his real father, allegedly dead. Peter doesn’t get along with his stepfather, a car salesman, who schemes to have him committed by a corrupt psychiatrist. In the asylum, Peter befriends two disturbed inmates and a health technician who help him escape. Among the absurd plot concoctions: Peter’s five-year-old half-brother, Lincoln, is psychic, allowing Peter extraordinary access to clues he needs to find his real father; and that his father has been searching for Peter all along. Patneaude resurrects elements from his first novel, Someone Was Watching (1993), in which a supposedly drowned sister has really been kidnapped, and in which a cross-country trip unfolds without much mishap. His writing style, however, is so robust that even if readers find little remotely connected to reality in these pages, there’s more than enough suspense in the fast-paced narrative to keep them entertained. (Fiction. 8-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8075-9098-3
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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