An interesting but ultimately unsatisfying experiment in form.
Why did an 18-year-old artist fall from an overpass in New York City in the middle of the night?
This “investigative” novel reveals the back story to Addison’s meteoric rise from small-town life to the art world’s it girl. Griffin is a character in her own novel as a reporter intent on getting to the bottom of the artist’s death. Addy had always shown a raw talent mixed with a magnetic personality that repelled people as often as it drew them to her. Haunted by voices, on anti-psychotic drugs after attempting suicide, Addy jumped at the chance to attend art school in New York when a video of her swinging from a chandelier, “drunk on fear,” went viral. Swept up in a frenzy of activity, in and out of love, she somehow found time to showcase her creative genius. Snippets of interviews sprinkled with color photographs and paintings form a portrait of a sassy and troubled young woman. The novel’s effectiveness as a tongue-in-cheek indictment of the shallowness of contemporary cultural life is undermined by an overreliance on stereotypes: the philandering father, clueless mother, aggressive agent, gay roommate, and most gratuitous of all, the family’s Hawaiian neighbors, who ask their shaman to perform a ritual of harmonic healing, recognizing that the “spirit here’s been troubled for a real long time.”
An interesting but ultimately unsatisfying experiment in form. (Fiction. 14 & up)Pub Date: Aug. 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61695-360-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Soho Teen
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
In the end, it’s just another violent dystopian series opener for all its yellow-brick veneer, but it’s a whole lot more fun...
When a cyclone deposits a 21st-century Kansas teen in Oz, she and readers discover there’ve been some changes made.
Dirt-poor “Salvation Amy” Gumm lives in a trailer park, effectively parenting her alcoholic mom (her dad ran off years ago), who seems to care more about her pet rat, Star, than her daughter. That doesn’t mean Amy is eager to be in Oz, particularly this Oz. Tyrannized by a megalomaniacal Dorothy and mined of its magic, it’s a dystopian distortion of the paradise Baum and MGM depicted. In short order, Amy breaks the wholly capricious laws and is thrown into a cell in the Emerald City with only Star for company. There, she’s visited first by the mysterious but sympathetic Pete and then by the witch Mombi, who breaks her out and takes her to the Revolutionary Order of the Wicked (among whom is the very hot Nox). Amy may well be the salvation of Oz—only someone from the Other Place can take Dorothy down. Paige has clearly had the time of her life with this reboot, taking a dystopian-romance template and laying it over Oz. Readers of Baum’s books will take special delight in seeing new twists on the old characters, and they will greet the surprise climactic turnabout with the smugness of insiders.
In the end, it’s just another violent dystopian series opener for all its yellow-brick veneer, but it’s a whole lot more fun than many of its ilk. (Dystopian fantasy. 14 & up)Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-228067-1
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
Engrossing and engaging.
An immersive senior year experience, beginnings and endings included.
After an amazing summer with her screenwriting partner, Maeve, in New York City, Paige Hancock’s life back home in Oakhurst, Indiana, is looking up—reminders of the drowning death two years earlier of her boyfriend, Aaron, and her reoccurring anxiety issues notwithstanding. But the start of her senior year heralds changes for relationships that give her life stability: with her tightknit friendship group; new boyfriend, Max; outgoing younger sister, Cameron; and divorced parents, whose relationship seems on the mend. She also works through wavering feelings about her college options—the safe in-state public university or private schools in New York and California? Enter Paige and friends’ bucket list for a final year of bonding! The theme of separation runs throughout the book, from her friends’ changing to Paige’s own evolving views on life. Screenplay references that frame the narration of Paige’s life and descriptions of how she deals with her anxiety make the story shine. The well-developed ensemble cast includes diverse family structures and shifting friendship dynamics that mirror Paige’s own evolution in this satisfying story that ties up all the loose ends. Paige and most main characters are white; one of Paige’s close friends is biracial (black and Polish), one is lesbian, and there is diversity in secondary characters.
Engrossing and engaging. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68119-938-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
