Not as emotionally engaging as readers might desire, but solid and well-told.
After discovering that her mother, Catherine Eversole Price, had not died, as her father told her, but instead deserted the family and then disappeared, 17-year-old Chelsea Price goes on a quest to find out what happened to her.
The narrative, a loose-limbed take on Wuthering Heights, is told in the alternating, first-person voices of daughter and mother. However, the emotional heart of the story belongs to Catherine, who as a senior in high school, was a young woman torn between an all-encompassing love for musician Hence and a desire to pursue her own ambitions. The story is set in motion when Chelsea unearths a 14-year-old letter from her mother. The return address leads her to Manhattan’s Lower East Side and a legendary rock club called The Underground. There she meets the adult Hence, now the club’s owner. Hence is a furious exposed nerve of a man, but surprisingly, he shows, if not a soft spot, then at least a less-hard one toward Chelsea, who greatly resembles her mother. The strands of mother’s and daughter’s stories come together during the suspenseful climax, when Chelsea discovers what actually happened to Catherine and gains a measure of peace and maturity.
Not as emotionally engaging as readers might desire, but solid and well-told. (Fiction. 15 & up)Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-19692-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poppy/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
Best leave it at maybe so.
Two 17-year-olds from the northern suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia, work together on a campaign for a progressive state senate candidate in an unlikely love story.
Co-authors Albertalli (Leah on the Offbeat, 2018, etc.) and Saeed (Bilal Cooks Daal, 2019, etc.) present Jamie Goldberg, a white Ashkenazi Jewish boy who suffers from being “painfully bad at anything girl-related,” and Maya Rehman, a Pakistani American Muslim girl struggling with her parents’ sudden separation. Former childhood best friends, they find themselves volunteered as a team by their mothers during a Ramadan “campaign iftar.” One canvassing adventure at a time, they grow closer despite Maya’s no-dating policy. Chapters alternate between Maya’s and Jamie’s first-person voices. The endearing, if somewhat clichéd, teens sweetly connect over similarities like divorced parents, and their activism will resonate with many. Jamie is sensitive, clumsy, and insecure; Maya is determined, sassy, a dash spoiled, and she swears freely. The novel covers timeless themes of teen activism and love-conquers-all along with election highs and lows, messy divorces, teen angst, bat mitzvah stress, social media gaffes, right-wing haters, friendship drama, and cultural misunderstandings, but the explicit advocacy at times interferes with an immersive reading experience and the text often feels repetitious. Maya’s mother is hijabi, and while Maya advocates against a hijab ban, she chooses not to wear hijab and actively wrestles with what it means to be an observant Muslim.
Best leave it at maybe so. (Romance. 14-18)Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06-293704-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
Exciting concept; underwhelming execution.
Once a year in the city-island of Caldella, the powerful Witch Queen leaves her Water Palace to find her true love, whom she must drown to appease the dark tide of the ever hungry ocean.
Thomas Lin is the only boy who’s ever escaped—by convincing the last Witch Queen to drown herself instead. Ever since then, her sister, Eva, who is the new Witch Queen, has been unable to appease the dark tide—she’s felt nothing for the boys she’s sacrificed. When Thomas is chosen a second time, Lina, a town girl with a crush, decides to rescue Thomas from the Water Palace and volunteer as sacrifice to make sure both Thomas and her own brother stay safe. As Lina and Eva spend more time together, they realize that they have a surprising amount in common: their love for their siblings, their desperation to change the sacrificial system, and their desire for one another. The close third-person narration is focalized alternately through Lina and Eva, and although Lina’s perspective provides greater depth, the narrative voice for each is removed, with more telling than showing. Characters are racially ambiguous but often implied through skin tone to be nonwhite. Diverse sexualities and gender expressions are also implied, but heteroromanticism is disappointingly the default.
Exciting concept; underwhelming execution. (Fantasy. 16-18)Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-7282-0998-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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