A sensitively told coming-of-age story, although it centers a White point of view on segregation.
A high school girl moves from the urban, integrated North to the rural, recently desegregated South in this YA novel.
Moving from a town she loves, Walled Lake, Michigan, to Curlew, Kentucky, is a difficult transition for 15-year-old Laura Graham; her family has already moved six times for her father’s job prospects. It’s February 1959, and last autumn, Laura watched her new school, Morrisburg High, on TV being forcibly desegregated by court order. Red-haired, freckled, and White, Laura favors desegregation but isn’t looking forward to a small rural school lacking many amenities. It helps some that Laura’s father grew up in Morrisburg and that everyone in town knows her uncle. She feels some culture shock, like having to say “sir,” but Laura soon bonds with Cherie Taylor—another Yankee transplant with similar musical tastes—and gains a boyfriend in senior Rick Holder. The area’s continuing de facto segregation bothers Laura, and when racists bully Althea Whitman, a Black classmate, she feels like a coward for not speaking up. Prejudice leads to tragedy when White parents insist on holding prom at a 50-miles-distant hotel that doesn’t allow Blacks. In her third YA novel, Stice illuminates the painful issues that linger after nominal desegregation. These are complicated; for example, her well-meaning attempt to apologize to Althea receives unexpected push back: “What good’s it do me for you to be sorry about anything?” Laura’s first-person narration, however, necessarily gives the story only a White voice. The story does get additional layers from Laura’s college dreams, which bring her into conflict with Rick’s desire to marry and underscores her father’s money and job struggles.
A sensitively told coming-of-age story, although it centers a White point of view on segregation.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 265
Publisher: Manuscript
Review Posted Online: March 23, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution.
A teenage girl finds herself alone after everyone else in her town mysteriously disappears, leaving her scrambling to figure out how to find them all.
One late summer day, everybody in July Fielding’s town disappears. She is left to piece together what happened, following a series of cryptic signs she finds around town urging her to “GET THEM BACK.” The narrative moves back and forth between July’s present and the events of the summer before, when her relationship with her best friend, cross-country team co-captain Sydney, starts to fracture due to a combination of jealousy over July’s new relationship with a cute boy called Sam and sweet up-and-coming freshman Ella’s threatening to overtake Syd’s status as star of the track team. The team members participate in a ritual in which they jump off a cliff into the rocky waters below at the end of their Friday practice runs. Though Ella is reluctant, Syd pressures her to jump. Short, frenetically paced sections move the story along quickly, and there is much foreshadowing pointing to something terrible that occurred at the end of that summer, which may be the key to July’s current predicament, but there is much misdirection too. Ultimately this is a story without enough setup to make the turn the book takes in the end feel fully developed or earned. All characters read white.
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780593327173
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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