Clements serves up a touching, realistic portrait of a shy high-school girl trapped between dueling parents. Erika insists she wants to live with her mother, instead of her too-busy father who loves her but seems to neglect her. Yet Erika’s mother could care less about her daughter, wanting her only for housework. No one but Erika’s court-appointed lawyer seems to care that Erika is struggling to succeed in school and with the intense demands of the leading role in a play. Clements trusts his readers to discern Erika’s true situation, simply by presenting the characters in her life through short scenes. He sometimes shifts the point of view to Jean, the lawyer, for a mature overview of the situation. The result shines through as the portrait of a real girl emerging from a life controlled by others into the beginnings of a life of her own. (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-32304-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
PLB 0-06-028386-6 In a story based on real events, and told in poems, Sones explores what happened and how she reacted when her adored older sister suddenly began screaming and hearing voices in her head, and was ultimately hospitalized. Individually, the poems appear simple and unremarkable, snapshot portraits of two sisters, a family, unfaithful friends, and a sweet first love. Collected, they take on life and movement, the individual frames of a movie that in the unspooling become animated, telling a compelling tale and presenting a painful passage through young adolescence. The form, a story-in-poems, fits the story remarkably well, spotlighting the musings of the 13-year-old narrator, and pinpointing the emotions powerfully. She copes with friends who snub her, worries that she, too, will go mad, and watches her sister’s slow recovery. To a budding genre that includes Karen Hesse’s Out of the Dust (1997) and Virginia Euwer Wolff’s Make Lemonade (1993), this book is a welcome addition. (Poetry. 10-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028387-4
Page Count: 220
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
A depressing, downbeat tale that attempts to make sense of the lives of some highly dysfunctional, unlikable people, but never quite succeeds. Life in the small desert town of Whitson, California, is not easy for anyone who lives there. Cat, 15, lives with her single mother Jackie, a hard-living barmaid whose relationships with men never work out. Jason is jaded beyond his years and full of contempt for his stodgy parents, who simply can’t deal with him; his one great passion is in-line skating, his means of escape from an otherwise pointless life, with a gang of skaters who show him the respect he gets nowhere else. While fleeing from a crime, Jason crashes into a younger boy, killing him, a fact that hardly seems to register. Meanwhile, Cat is pregnant; she’s always loved Jason and hopes that he will love her back. Her chance to start over arrives when she miscarriages, but Jason is not so lucky; his encounter with the older brother of the boy he killed results in a terrible accident that changes Jason’s life forever, but cannot change the person he has become. Readers will breathe a sigh of relief if they make it to the conclusion of this book; some of it resembles literary psychobabble, but the images—of desperate lives careening out of control—linger. The passages of remarkably poised, fluid writing make Smith’s debut, despite its disheartening message, unusually strong. (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7894-2625-0
Page Count: 182
Publisher: DK Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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