Sonia Rodríguez is the American-born daughter of illegal Mexican immigrants. Her hardworking father struggles to support the family while her pregnant mother stays in bed watching telenovelas and calling out for her daughter to run errands or do chores—tasks that her brothers are not expected to complete. Despite her duties at home, Sonia struggles to keep up with her schoolwork. When she rebels, her mother sends her to spend the summer with her grandmother in Mexico, a punishment that turns into an idyll, and rests as the strongest part of the book. When she returns, Sonia must confront her alcoholic uncle’s unwelcome advances and find her place in the world. While the first-person voice attempts color and authenticity, the secondary characterizations rely on stereotypes about Mexican Americans. Although Sonia pays lip service to confronting these early on, attempts to provide complexity are undercut: Her religious aunt and perverted “drunkle” have no redeeming qualities, and her father approaches the saintly. Sonia’s perspective is necessarily subjective, but her own development as a character fails to bring needed balance to these depictions. (Fiction. YA)
Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4231-1072-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Emotions run high in this skillfully crafted tale.
Heartbreak is best remedied with Pop Rocks, ice cream, and illicit champagne. If only all wounds were so easily mended.
On a snowy January night, Tundra Cove High School senior Bailey Pierce is drowning her sorrows over ex-boyfriend Cade with her best friend, Vanessa Carson, when Vanessa receives a text that causes her to flee their cozy sleepover and head out into the treacherous Alaskan night. She never makes it home. Her car is found beneath the cliff below an icy mountain road—a road she shouldn’t have been on if she were heading home to meet her boyfriend, Mason, as she claimed. Grief-stricken and unsatisfied with the explanation of the accident, Bailey, who has been coding since she was 4, creates a virtual Vanessa from an old AI program created by one of her moms. V, as she nicknames the chatbot, effectively simulates Vanessa, a former Junior Olympics–bound cross-country skier and keen book blogger, but the V that emerges is not the friend Bailey thought she knew. Intricately plotted and emotionally impactful, this story suspensefully and viscerally peels back the layers of the girls’ friendship. Short chapters, Google search histories, and strings of text messages heighten the emotional punch, while the ethical implications of Bailey’s creation are thought-provoking. Main characters read as White; Esther, Bailey’s newfound friend, is cued as Indigenous.
Emotions run high in this skillfully crafted tale. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: March 29, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-06-295443-5
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
Hypnotic and jagged free verse wrenchingly chronicles 16-year-old Kristina’s addiction to crank. Kristina’s daring alter ego, Bree, emerges when “gentle clouds of monotony” smother Kristina’s life—when there’s nothing to do and no one to connect with. Visiting her neglectful and druggy father for the first time in years, Bree meets a boy and snorts crank (methamphetamine). The rush is irresistible and she’s hooked, despite a horrible crank-related incident with the boy’s other girlfriend. Back home with her mother, Kristina feels both ignored and smothered, needing more drugs and more boys—in that order. One boy is wonderful and one’s a rapist, but it’s crank holding Bree up at this point. The author’s sharp verse plays with spacing on the page, sometimes providing two alternate readings. In a too brief wrap-up, Kristina keeps her baby (a product of rape) while Hopkins—realistically—offers no real conclusion. Powerful and unsettling. (author’s note) (Fiction. YA)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-689-86519-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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