Fine has a unique gift for presenting serious topics in stories leavened with circumstances and dialogue made hilarious not so much because they're exaggerated as because they're all too believable. Having dealt with a war between divorced parents (Alias Madame Doubtfire, 1988) and an attack by a reluctant stepchild on her new dad (My War with Goggle-Eyes, 1989, Carnegie Medal), she now presents a painfully familiar, laugh-aloud funny conflict between a teenager and her whole family. Prompted by an author on a school visit (in the book's most delightfully satirical scene), nice, gangly Will Flowers describes his family's agony in the wake of his one-year-younger sister Estelle's abrupt metamorphosis from gentle, reliable 13- year-old to perpetually belligerent banshee. Doggedly, Mum (who's a lawyer) and Dad (who runs a gas station) try to keep their cool and spell each other with the rough spots, but they're so focused on their new problem child that they hardly notice that little Muffy is so shell-shocked that she has virtually stopped speaking, while ever-hungry Will can never find a crisis-free time for someone to give him lunch money. Meanwhile, Will rereads a favorite book on life in the trenches in WW I, garnering enlightening parallels; and Fine deftly lets slip the news that he's not so easy to live with, either, and needs to assert himself more—like the precocious Estelle. Sure enough, when Will finally speaks out, the entire family dynamic is nudged toward sanity; even Estelle regains some humanity. A winner: wise, witty, and right on target. (Fiction. 12+)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-316-28992-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1991
Pitamic bites off more than she can chew with this instructional art volume, but its core projects will excite in the right context. Twelve pieces of fine art inspire two art projects apiece. Matisse’s The Snail opens the Color section; after history and analysis, there’s one project arranging multicolored tissue-paper squares and one project adding hue to white paint to create stripes of value gradation. These creative endeavors exploring value, shade, texture and various media will exhilarate young artists—but only with at best semi-successful results, as they require an adult dedicated to both advance material procurement and doing the artwork along with the child. Otherwise, complex instructions plus a frequent requirement to draw or trace realistically will cause frustration. Much of the text is above children’s heads, errors of terminology and reproduction detract and the links between the famous pieces and the projects are imprecise. However, an involved adult and an enterprising child aged seven to ten will find many of the projects fabulously challenging and rewarding. Art In Action 2 (ISBN: 978-0-7641-441-7) publishes simultaneously. (artist biographies, glossary, location of originals) (Nonfiction. Adults)
Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7641-4440-0
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Barron's
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
The complementary strengths of a social-science writer and a psychiatrist produce a balanced sociological/neuro-biological exploration of violence as a public-health problem. Humans are exceptional: other species rarely kill their own. The authors tell how violence has been explained and countered, from exploding the XYY myth and giving a history of psychosurgery (including lobotomies) to trying to understand hate crimes. Seeing violence as multicausal in nature (drug addiction, poverty, and a search for control, etc.), they cite cases to demonstrate both sides of each issue, e.g., violence and its relation to TV. Perhaps the gravity of the problem comes through most arrestingly in street terminology, where a ``mushroom'' is a person unwittingly caught in drug-war crossfire. Aside from an occasional tendency to lop off stories (Joe abused of the elderly, but what did he do?), a thoughtful examination that compares theory with a reality where there are no satisfactory answers. Glossary; notes; sources; bibliography; index. (Nonfiction. 12+)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-531-11060-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1991
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