An absorbing treatise on living fully and truthfully.
Emotional honesty wins the day.
Everyone’s happy in the town of Serenity. It’s right there in the guidelines for residents: “CHOOSE HAPPINESS.” And that’s exactly what 12-year-old Mackenzie Werner and her friends do. Things are a little more complicated for Mackenzie; her feelings manifest as a colorful haze around her body. She’s mostly able to control her emotions (“Every day can be sunny and bright if you decide to make it that way”) until a new family moves to Serenity to work on a documentary about the town. Suddenly Mackenzie is confronted with some tough questions: Is being happy all the time really possible? The weight of projecting outward positivity takes its toll, and suddenly Mackenzie’s colors explode out of her during an interview for the documentary. Now everyone within the blast range has a haze like hers and must contend with the fallout of having their emotions on display. Though some aspects of the story are less effective than others (for instance, the chapters written from the perspective of places and emotions), overall this is an intriguing exploration of the effects of conformity and suppressing emotions. While readers get brief glimpses into other people’s lives through the documentary interviews, character development is generally light. The writing is well paced and engaging, and the book ends with helpful grounding techniques as well as resources for helping adults and tweens cope with overwhelming emotions. Mackenzie’s family presents white, though there’s racial diversity among her friends.
An absorbing treatise on living fully and truthfully. (Speculative fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781662620614
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Astra Young Readers
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2024
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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