In spite of its predictability, likely to find an appreciative audience among young teens.
Thirteen-year-old Flint, aka “Squint,” is determined to finish his comic book in time to enter it in a contest—and before he loses so much more of his eyesight that he can no longer see to draw.
Squint has a degenerative corneal disease that has left him with thick glasses that do little to correct his vision but make him a magnet for bullying by popular kids. When popular McKell reaches out to him, his first reaction is to protect himself by rejecting her. But then he discovers that she’s dealing with plenty herself; her older brother, Danny, has progeria, a rare disease that’s killing him. Danny has a popular YouTube channel in which he suggests challenges or activities designed to bring people together. After his death, the videos keep coming, serving, poignantly, to draw McKell and Squint closer as he gradually emerges from his self-imposed isolation. Squint’s comic-book tale accompanies and parallels his first-person narration, crafting a fantasy world where Squint can be the superhero of his dreams. But it’s the drawing of the comics that presents the greatest challenge to him with his poor vision. The book assumes a white default, with Squint assumed white and biracial McKell half-Filipina and presumably half-white. That Squint’s drawings are not included seems like a major missed opportunity to broaden this sometimes-maudlin tale of loss and redemption.
In spite of its predictability, likely to find an appreciative audience among young teens. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-62972-485-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Not for the faint of heart or stomach (or maybe of any parts) but sure to be appreciated by middle school zombie cognoscenti.
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle meets Left for Dead/The Walking Dead/Shaun of the Dead in a high-energy, high-humor look at the zombie apocalypse, complete with baseball (rather than cricket) bats.
The wholesome-seeming Iowa cornfields are a perfect setting for the emergence of ghastly anomalies: flesh-eating cows and baseball-coach zombies. The narrator hero, Rabi (for Rabindranath), and his youth baseball teammates and friends, Miguel and Joe, discover by chance that all is not well with their small town’s principal industry: the Milrow corporation’s giant feedlot and meat-production and -packing facility. The ponds of cow poo and crammed quarters for the animals are described in gaggingly smelly detail, and the bone-breaking, bloody, flesh-smashing encounters with the zombies have a high gross-out factor. The zombie cows and zombie humans who emerge from the muck are apparently a product of the food supply gone cuckoo in service of big-money profits with little concern for the end result. It’s up to Rabi and his pals to try to prove what’s going on—and to survive the corporation’s efforts to silence them. Much as Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (2010) was a clarion call to action against climate change, here’s a signal alert to young teens to think about what they eat, while the considerable appeal of the characters and plot defies any preachiness.
Not for the faint of heart or stomach (or maybe of any parts) but sure to be appreciated by middle school zombie cognoscenti. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-22078-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
A predictable, fast-paced sports tale with some unexpected heart.
Harrison has led a hard-knock life up until he’s taken in by loving foster parents “Coach” and Jennifer.
After he inadvertently causes the man’s death, Harrison is taken from a brutal foster home run by a farmer who uses foster kids as unpaid labor, a situation blithely ignored by the county. His new foster parents are different. Coach is in charge of the middle school football team, and all 13-year-old Harrison has ever wanted to do is to play football, the perfect outlet for his seething undercurrent of anger at life. Oversized for his age, he’s brilliant at the game but also over-the-top aggressive, until a hit makes his knee start aching—and then life deals him another devastating blow. The pain isn’t an injury but bone cancer. Many of the characters—loving friends Justin and Becky, bully Leo, a mean-spirited math teacher, cancer victim Marty and the major, an amputee veteran who comes to rehabilitate Harrison after life-changing surgery—are straight out of the playbook for maudlin middle-grade fiction. Nevertheless, this effort edges above trite because of well-depicted football scenes and the sheer force of Harrison himself. His altogether believable anger diminishes his likability but breathes life into an otherwise stock role.
A predictable, fast-paced sports tale with some unexpected heart. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-208956-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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