by Bruce Ingram ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 2017
An author deftly mines his own experiences as a teacher to create diverse and relatable characters facing their first year...
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Four ninth-graders navigate demanding teachers, family conflicts, and new relationships in a debut novel for young teens.
It’s the first day of school for four ninth-graders. Introvert Luke dreads it. Cocky athlete Marcus can’t wait to make his mark in a football game. Well-to-do Elly and hardworking Mia are eager to excel. The lives of the teens intersect in first period Honors English, and as the year progresses, all four narrate their own journeys through the highs and lows of teachers, family, friendships, and dates. Elly, a white girl, fears that she’ll never have a boyfriend because she thinks she’s “chubby.” When a first, clandestine date ends in a sloppy kiss, she worries she’ll never find real romance. Luke, also white, has internalized the low expectations of those who see only his poverty and dysfunctional family. His English teacher recognizes his potential; a science instructor makes him a target of ridicule. (Ingram, a high school English teacher, doesn’t sugarcoat the fact that some instructors don’t belong in the profession.) Black teen Marcus, from a well-off family, is used to being admired on and off the football field and doesn’t understand why his self-absorption is a turnoff. Mia, a second-generation Mexican-American, has faced prejudice and is determined to prove “I belong here.” A sweetly blossoming relationship between Luke, whose father is a bigot, and Mia, whose dad distrusts whites, seems destined to make them the Romeo and Juliet of the group. Ingram approaches this territory with a knowing and sympathetic eye, giving each teen an authentic voice expressed in a lively flow of alternating, journal-style chapters. (At one point Marcus muses: “I can’t believe Joshua’s attitude, it’s like he’s given up on pro football. It seems like everybody I was around last week had a negative attitude.”) For gritty content, readers should look elsewhere—no sex, drugs, or binge-drinking here. But these teens’ everyday interactions, doubts, and triumphs ring true, and readers should want to find out what happens to them next in Ingram’s upcoming second novel, Tenth Grade Angst.
An author deftly mines his own experiences as a teacher to create diverse and relatable characters facing their first year in high school.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944962-34-0
Page Count: 236
Publisher: Secant Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Markus Zusak ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 9, 2018
Much like building a bridge stone by stone, this read requires painstaking effort and patience.
Years after the death of their mother, the fourth son in an Australian family of five boys reconnects with his estranged father.
Matthew Dunbar dug up the old TW, the typewriter his father buried (along with a dog and a snake) in the backyard of his childhood home. He searched for it in order to tell the story of the family’s past, a story about his mother, who escaped from Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall; about his father, who abandoned them all after their mother’s death; about his brother Clay, who built a bridge to reunite their family; and about a mule named Achilles. Zusak (The Book Thief, 2006, etc.) weaves a complex narrative winding through flashbacks. His prose is thick with metaphor and heavy with allusions to Homer’s epics. The story romanticizes Matthew and his brothers’ often violent and sometimes homophobic expressions of their cisgender, heterosexual masculinity with reflections unsettlingly reminiscent of a “boys will be boys” attitude. Women in the book primarily play the roles of love interests, mothers, or (in the case of their neighbor) someone to marvel at the Dunbar boys and give them jars to open. The characters are all presumably white.
Much like building a bridge stone by stone, this read requires painstaking effort and patience. (Fiction. 16-adult)Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984830-15-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
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by Anna Waggener ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2012
Grim indeed, without respite, often without rhyme or reason.
As a human family tussles against bitter seraphim in the underworld, misery runs constant—never waning, never tempered.
Waggener’s debut opens with a cryptic prologue by mother-of-three Erika. A car accident sends Erika to the underworld, accompanied by Jeremiah, an adult rogue (neither seraph nor human). Jeremiah refuses to explain anything, including whether Erika’s dead. He mutters arcane things and snaps when Erika doesn’t understand. That this motif, of a controlling male who keeps a woman in the dark, is common doesn't make it any less infuriating; that Erika falls for Jeremiah is predictable as well. What makes no sense is Erika’s demand that her children join her—as if people could travel to Limbo alive and unharmed. She visits them in dreams, unconcerned that those dream-visits are nightmares to them. Erika’s 17-year-old and 18-year-old sometimes narrate as the unrelentingly dismal plot moves through drowning, stabbings, metaphorical rape and breathless chases. The youngest child dies more than once. Generations-long sourness infuses both Erika’s family (alcoholism, abuse) and the seraphim (marital infidelity and a bastard child; black pages with white font tell Jeremiah’s parents’ thread). Limbo is a city slum. Moreover, although young-adult literature has no cemented definition, casting two of four protagonists as adults—Erika’s in her 30s—firmly removes this particular text from teen concerns.
Grim indeed, without respite, often without rhyme or reason. (Horror. 16 & up)Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-38480-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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