Famous author Ian Tremblin has chosen five teenagers to spend the night in his haunted mansion. The young aspiring writers and Tremblin will tell each other horror stories all night, and Tremblin will select the best storyteller, who will have a horror novel published. The motley crew of young writers is a veritable Breakfast Club lineup: Chris, the unexpectedly sensitive jock; Chelsea, the freaky Goth girl; Kara, the shy girl who doesn’t like horror; Demarius, the black adolescent whose main personality trait is being less dysfunctional than the others; and Wade, the panic-attack–plagued narrator. As the night progresses, the teens learn that spending the night in a haunted house is not as easy as they might have suspected. The short stories Tremblin and his protégés tell are of indifferent quality, appropriate as campfire tales more than short stories. The framing narrative, however, builds predictable but enjoyable tension as the characters’ fear and danger grow. An unexpectedly optimistic ending concludes this gentle horror tale. (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: June 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8171-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
In an unnamed country (a thinly veiled Philippines), three teenage boys pick trash for a meager living. A bag of cash in the trash might be—well, not their ticket out of poverty but at least a minor windfall. With 1,100 pesos, maybe they can eat chicken occasionally, instead of just rice. Gardo and Raphael are determined not to give any of it to the police who've been sniffing around, so they enlist their friend Rat. In alternating and tightly paced points of view, supplemented by occasional other voices, the boys relate the intrigue in which they're quickly enmeshed. A murdered houseboy, an orphaned girl, a treasure map, a secret code, corrupt politicians and 10,000,000 missing dollars: It all adds up to a cracker of a thriller. Sadly, the setting relies on Third World poverty tourism for its flavor, as if this otherwise enjoyable caper were being told by Olivia, the story's British charity worker who muses with vacuous sentimentality on the children that "break your heart" and "change your life." Nevertheless, a zippy and classic briefcase-full-of-money thrill ride. (Thriller. 12-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-75214-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: David Fickling/Random
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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