A fun mystery with a clever hero that offers sharp, surprising takes on big issues.
A 16-year-old investigates her new high school’s murderous secrets in Gibbs’ YA novel.
Izzy Brown and her twin brother, Axl, are living in a trailer with their mother in Dandridge, Florida, when Axl’s football talents earn them both a wealthy and powerful benefactor. Real estate mogul Dalton Wolfe moves the twins to the exclusive Bardo Academy, named after its neighboring “laboratory-developed beach community,” as Izzy calls it. Axl quickly feels at home there as the star jock, but Izzy’s feisty comebacks and thoughtful nature make it harder for her to feel at ease with kids whose houses look “like the set of a drug lord film.” Still, she finds her place on the staff of the Bardo Breeze, the school newspaper, and befriends Elton Jones-Davies, a nice boy with Asperger syndrome who loves editing Wikipedia entries. Wanting to become an investigative journalist on a par with Nellie Bly, Izzy, with Elton’s help, starts digging into the unsolved 1983 murder of Ricky Lee, another star football player who was attending Bardo on a scholarship. As adults who remember Ricky become skittish around the investigation, Izzy finds herself turning to prescription drugs to numb the stress of trying to untangle dark secrets. Set in 2008, months before that year’s financial crisis and at the beginning of the opioid crisis, Gibbs’ teen thriller has smart, relevant social commentary bubbling under its surface. Izzy is capable and smart but also relatably flawed and critical of herself, and flashbacks to 1983 reveal Ricky’s status as an outsider at Bardo in multiple ways. The parallel stories reinforce the book’s complex perspective on privilege, otherness, and Florida in general while leading up to an outlandish twist.
A fun mystery with a clever hero that offers sharp, surprising takes on big issues.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Borne Back Books
Review Posted Online: April 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A lush and hypnotic modern fairy tale.
Ten years ago, enigmatic film star Mireille Foix disappeared from Viloxin, her Mediterranean island home, leaving her pharma tycoon husband and two young daughters bereft.
Eighteen-year-old Manon and 17-year-old Thaïs have lived with their aunt in New York City ever since, and their father’s death the previous summer still stings. Tai is puckish and effervescent, with “beautiful gemstones of stories that she’s sharpened to points” and musical laughter that hides deep insecurity. Noni, on the other hand, is a bookish and unabashedly melancholy young woman. When they get an invitation to return to Viloxin, the “Eden” of their childhood, as guests of honor at a retrospective of their mother’s work, they can’t pass it up. Soon after their arrival, Tai discovers White Fox, a legendary unfinished script penned by her mother. The screenplay, which is nestled in between Tai’s and Manon’s narratives as well as that of Boy, a darkly mysterious third narrator, may hold the key to Mireille’s fate. Desperate for the truth, Tai and Noni are enticed into an eerie and darkly seductive puzzle box of enigmatic clues, revelations, and danger. Faring, an imaginative, tactile, and immensely quotable wordsmith, explores the complexities of sisterhood and grief with a deft hand, and her unusual island setting, with its futuristic touches, draws readers in with a sensuous warmth that belies the sharp teeth beneath its surface. Most main characters seem to be White.
A lush and hypnotic modern fairy tale. (Mystery. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-30452-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Imprint
Review Posted Online: July 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Hard-to-read story, hard-to-stop-reading writing.
A hardscrabble antihero’s coming out lands him in an off-the-grid conversion camp.
Connor Major of Ambrose, Illinois, has quite a mouth on him. But when it comes to the rite-of-passage revelation to his single, hardcore Christian mother that he’s gay, he can’t find his words. At the behest of his boyfriend, Ario, Connor begrudgingly comes out, which is where the book begins. His rocky relationship with his mother is disintegrating, his frustration with exuberantly out Ario grows, accusations of being the absentee father of his BFF’s baby boy haunt him, and he gets violently absconded to a Christian conversion camp in Costa Rica. And that’s all before the unraveling of a mystery, a murder, gunshots, physical violence, emotional abuse, heat, humidity, and hell on Earth happen in the span of a single day. This story points fingers at despicable zealots and applauds resilient queer kids. Connor’s physical and emotional inability to fully find comfort in being gay isn’t magically erased, acknowledging the difficulty of self-acceptance in the face of disapproving homophobes. Lord of the Flies–like survival skills, murder, and brutal violence (Tasers, spears, guns) fuel the story. And secret sex and romance underscore the lack of social liberty and self-acceptance but also support the optimistic hope of freedom. Connor is White, as is the majority of the cast; Ario is Muslim.
Hard-to-read story, hard-to-stop-reading writing. (Fiction 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63583-061-3
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Flux
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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