An affecting teen drama with an affable hero.
A teenager gifted with clairvoyant visions tries to rescue a missing woman while on a road trip with his lifelong crush.
Mason, a recent high school graduate living in Naperville, Illinois, has experienced strange visions since he was a child, visions triggered by vehicles’ skid marks on roads. His power is so peculiarly specific that it borders on the inadvertently comical: “For every tire track he drove over, he felt each moment as he saw it. He saw the screams, the wide eyes, the white knuckles. He felt the fear, the confusion, the shock. Those moments were real, a part of someone’s life, someone’s history, and they became part of his.” The power fills Mason with unease, so he keeps it to himself; his best friend from childhood, Addie, thinks he just has a creative ability to concoct richly detailed stories spontaneously. Mason loves Addie, though he’s unsure if the feeling is mutual, and he takes a road trip with her to her new home in Nevada. He’s not only anxious about her departure, but also about an article he recently read about a missing woman, Kenna Cook, who vanished one night after her car broke down. Mason learns that skid marks were found at the scene and feels a responsibility to help find her, though he worries about what Addie will think. In this YA novel, Burrell thoughtfully renders Mason’s double sense of alienation: Not only is he grappling with adolescence, but he has a weird, uncontrollable supernatural ability. His relationship with Addie is also tenderly and realistically portrayed. The novel tends toward the earnest and sentimental, and the author’s writing style can be bland. This is an intelligent depiction of teenage life, however, made ever more dramatic with a crime story and an element of the supernatural.
An affecting teen drama with an affable hero.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781957656212
Page Count: 286
Publisher: Monarch Educational Services, L.L.C.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A descriptive and atmospheric paranormal social thriller that could be a bit tighter.
After a Nigerian British girl goes off to an exclusive boarding school that seems to prey on less-privileged students, she discovers there might be some truth behind an urban legend.
Ife Adebola joins the Urban Achievers scholarship program at pricey, high-pressure Nithercott School, arriving shortly after a student called Leon mysteriously disappeared. Gossip says he’s a victim of the glowing-eyed Changing Man who targets the lonely, leaving them changed. Ife doesn’t believe in the myth, but amid the stresses of Nithercott’s competitive, privileged, majority-white environment, where she is constantly reminded of her state school background, she does miss her friends and family. When Malika, a fellow Black scholarship student, disappears and then returns, acting strangely devoid of personality, Ife worries the Changing Man is real—and that she’s next. Ife joins forces with classmate Bijal and Benny, Leon’s younger brother, to uncover the truth about who the Changing Man is and what he wants. Culminating in a detailed, gory, and extended climactic battle, this verbose thriller tempts readers with a nefarious mystery involving racial and class-based violence but never quite lives up to its potential and peters out thematically by its explosive finale. However, this debut offers highly visually evocative and eerie descriptions of characters and events and will appeal to fans of creature horror, social commentary, and dark academia.
A descriptive and atmospheric paranormal social thriller that could be a bit tighter. (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781250868138
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution.
A teenage girl finds herself alone after everyone else in her town mysteriously disappears, leaving her scrambling to figure out how to find them all.
One late summer day, everybody in July Fielding’s town disappears. She is left to piece together what happened, following a series of cryptic signs she finds around town urging her to “GET THEM BACK.” The narrative moves back and forth between July’s present and the events of the summer before, when her relationship with her best friend, cross-country team co-captain Sydney, starts to fracture due to a combination of jealousy over July’s new relationship with a cute boy called Sam and sweet up-and-coming freshman Ella’s threatening to overtake Syd’s status as star of the track team. The team members participate in a ritual in which they jump off a cliff into the rocky waters below at the end of their Friday practice runs. Though Ella is reluctant, Syd pressures her to jump. Short, frenetically paced sections move the story along quickly, and there is much foreshadowing pointing to something terrible that occurred at the end of that summer, which may be the key to July’s current predicament, but there is much misdirection too. Ultimately this is a story without enough setup to make the turn the book takes in the end feel fully developed or earned. All characters read white.
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780593327173
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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