A meandering volume of poetry and prose that focuses on a teenager from Ghana and school issues.
A short novel and a collection of poems deal with the subjects of peer pressure and bullying.
Selom, a 16-year-old from Ghana, comes to New York to attend high school. Her public school is diverse—“Caribbean, Africans, Black Americans, Indians”—and yet the culture shock requires some adjustments. Even more difficult to navigate are the social hazards of being a teenager: getting called ugly in the cafeteria, getting asked out by a boy via his friend. Her home life is crowded—she and her sisters are forced to share a bed in her uncle’s house. At school, she faces a constant barrage of boys telling her how much they like her. She attempts to hunker down and focus on her work while also pursuing creative writing on the side, but the constant male attention at school threatens the American education that Selom and her family have worked so hard, and sacrificed so much, to attain. The text concludes with a collection of 17 poems, most of which deal with themes of teenage alienation and loneliness, such as “Sometimes”: “Sometimes, / I walk alone, / And think alone, / But no one knows, / I am alone.” Dzissah (A World of Beautiful Colors, 2015, etc.) admits in her introduction that this book is a revised version of an earlier volume, The Westerners (2005), and there is a hodgepodge quality to this work that is more confusing than it is cohesive. The novel shifts tense several times over the course of the narrative, and the characters feel less like people than names that come in and out of Selom’s classrooms. The poems are thematically linked to the novel (more or less), but they don’t come together to make a satisfying whole. An interstitial chapter about bullying reads like an attempt to use these disparate works to make a larger point, and while the attention paid to the subject is worthwhile, the book remains mostly amorphous and ultimately insubstantial.
A meandering volume of poetry and prose that focuses on a teenager from Ghana and school issues.Pub Date: June 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5035-6910-2
Page Count: 134
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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