by Angel M. Huerta ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 29, 2013
An inspiring, filled-to-the-brim adventure; a great example of superpowers done right.
A group of middle school kids learns to use their superpowers in Huerta’s debut novel.
Dr. Lucas McKenna, alongside his partner Dr. Benjamin Price, used to run a genetics lab in Portland, Maine. Together, they worked on the Gray Matter Project, which focused on helping people use more than 10 percent of their brains. Price died in a mysterious plane crash, and McKenna came under suspicion of sabotage, losing his lab funding and career. Ten years later, he’s teaching middle school science in the all-American town of Tempe Ville, Maine. He’s been lucky enough to know and instruct a group of remarkable children gifted with superpowers: Annie (invisibility), GG (super strength), Sophie (healing) and Tommy (telepathy). When a new student named Peter survives a bizarre accident, McKenna realizes he too must have powers. Peter, in fact, can move things with his mind—he only needs practice. While quick to befriend his fellow carriers of what McKenna calls the “alpha gene,” Peter also never backs down from bullies, often causing more harm than good. McKenna decides to shape these supertalented kids into a team that can work together before the shadowy group that’s been stalking him closes in. Huerta, in a fast-paced story laced with sweetness and smarts, reveals the hidden lives of blossoming superheroes. Middle school shenanigans—like shopping at a forbidden candy store or hunting a local ghost—complement scenes in which Peter masters his power. The author frequently offers his heroes, and his young audience, solid real-world advice, like when McKenna tells Peter to “practice his ability and stretch the brain muscle every day.” His female characters, sadly, feel underused. Annie, though featured in an early flashback as the miraculously disappearing baby, slides into the background as Peter’s love interest. Sophie, an introvert, only pops up when someone needs healing. That said, this coming-of-age story is clever enough to delight anyone who picks it up. Occasional grammatical glitches, like the use of “worst” when “worse” is meant, can’t change that.
An inspiring, filled-to-the-brim adventure; a great example of superpowers done right.Pub Date: June 29, 2013
ISBN: 978-0989501408
Page Count: 340
Publisher: Angel M. Huerta
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
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Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951
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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