Fresh, well-described setting and vibrant characters, with one or two missteps.
After his brother is shot execution style, a Caribbean teenager decides to investigate and clear his name in this YA novel.
On Barberry Hill, St. Kitts, social and economic differences are echoed in its topography. The mansions of the rich sit on the hilltop, while down below are shacks housing poor people and drug dealers. In between but closer to the top, 14-year-old Jaden lives with his brother, Rashid, who’s 16; his father; and grandmother. His mother has been working in America since he was 6, sending home barrels of gifts but never visiting. That is, until she has to return for Rashid’s funeral. He was shot in the head right outside his house in what everyone, including the police and Rashid’s father, assumes is gang violence. But Jaden doesn’t buy it. Rashid must have been unlucky. Seeing his mother again stirs up conflicting emotions in Jaden. With the help of his best friends, MJ and Stein, Jaden decides to prove his brother’s innocence of gang ties and restore his reputation. The friends risk beatings or worse to find the truth—which holds some surprises. Ottley-Mitchell (The Complete Collection of Chee Chee’s Adventures, 2017, etc.) has written other children’s and young-adult books set in the Caribbean, and she evokes her setting well, an unusual one for YA literature. She doesn’t shy away from the sometimes-harsh realities of Jaden’s St. Kitts, where gangs rule the school and seemingly “every day you heard about somebody getting gunned down.” She skillfully captures Jaden’s grief, anxiety, feelings of abandonment, fear, and other stormy emotions, as well as the rhythms of friendship and dialogue among teenage boys. Problems include repetition (Jaden’s mission gets stated too often for a short book) and a weak, clichéd motivation for Jaden’s father’s apparent lack of interest in pursuing Rashid’s murder.
Fresh, well-described setting and vibrant characters, with one or two missteps.Pub Date: June 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9978900-2-0
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CaribbeanReads Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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