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FRUIT

Name: FRUIT
Author: Brian Francis
ISBN: 1-931561-76-1

by Brian Francis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 20, 2004

A lovely and odd take on a time many of us would just as soon forget.

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Peter is an average eighth grader, except that his nipples are speaking to him.

It must be said that newcomer Francis has found one of the more ingenious, bizarre, and creepily affecting metaphors for this time of life. At the beginning of eighth grade, Peter Paddington—already a few strikes behind in the popularity game, being overweight and chronically insecure—has a new problem to contend with: his nipples have popped out. They were now “round and puffy and not the two pink raisins they used to be.” Not only that, but the nipples are also speaking to him, telling him not to be such a wuss, stand up for himself, and all those things that scared young boys hate to hear. Terrified that people will notice the change in his body, Peter wraps tape around his chest to keep things hidden. Everything that’s going on with Peter—from his nipples to the hair that keeps sprouting horridly all over his body and the powerful feelings he has for the handsome and much more popular Andrew Sinclair—is perfectly normal, of course, but to a frightened and lonely teenager it’s like living inside a bad horror movie. All this could be helped if Peter had anybody to talk to about things, but his only real friend is Daniela from across the street, who’s too busy raging against her parents to pay Peter any mind. His smothering mother keeps imploring him to go make a “boy friend,” and his sympathetic father is hardly the communicative type, leaving Peter to sort himself out. Francis has a true gift for the roiling mental interior of adolescence, and his refusal to cop out with false dramatics makes this an uncommonly honest piece of work.

A lovely and odd take on a time many of us would just as soon forget.

Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2004

ISBN: 1-931561-76-1

Page Count: 284

Publisher: MacAdam/Cage

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004

Categories:

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION

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GOING SOLO

by Roald Dahl illustrated by Quentin Blake ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1986

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A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986

ISBN: 0142413836

Page Count: 209

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986

Categories:

TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
QUENTIN BLAKE'S FANTASTIC JOURNEYS
by Quentin Blake ; illustrated by Quentin Blake

- BOOK REVIEW
<i>MONA LISA</i> AND THE OTHERS
by Alice Harman ; illustrated by Quentin Blake

- BOOK REVIEW
ROALD DAHL SHAPES
developed by Roald Dahl ; illustrated by Quentin Blake

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MONSTER

by Walter Dean Myers ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 31, 1999

The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...

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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)