A standard novel about being true to who you are.
A young, white television star breaks away from Hollywood to go on a cross-country road trip with four of his biggest fans.
Cash Carter, with his good looks and celebrity status as the lead on the wildly successful television show Wiz Kids, seems to have it all. The only problem is that he is miserable. Tired of feeling that he has no control over his life, he answers a fan letter inviting him to accompany four friends on their pre-college road trip from Illinois to California. While Colfer has some good insights into the realities of dealing with fame, this latest novel is a paint-by-numbers coming-of-age story with cringeworthy dialogue and a cast of stock characters whose racial and sexual diversity feels forced and provides little three-dimensionality. Every character-stereotype box is checked, from the mixed-race closeted preacher’s son to the Japanese-American girl whose father barely understands English and is intent on pushing her into Stanford. The author clearly understands the downside of becoming a young TV sensation but struggles to translate that experience to Cash’s character in a way that generates empathy. The supporting characters have their own struggles but are off on their road trip before those can resonate with readers. The novel’s best scene is when Cash helps the closeted character accept himself.
A standard novel about being true to who you are. (Fiction. 15-17)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-38344-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
This sophomoric sophomore effort reads like a rough draft for a screenplay…which it may well be.
High school senior Carson Phillips will get into Northwestern and be the youngest freelance journalist published in all the major outlets, and he’s not above blackmail to get there.
Although he’s single-handedly kept the Clover High Chronicle in print and the Writing Club functioning (by teaching the journalism class, one of many credulity-stretching details) for years, Carson is worried that he won’t get into his dream school. The acceptance letter will be his ticket out of the backward town of Clover which, like high school, is peopled by Carson’s intellectual inferiors. When his counselor suggests he edit and submit a literary magazine with his application, Carson and his dim, plagiaristic sidekick Malerie hatch a scheme to blackmail a chunk of the student body into submitting work. Colfer’s joyless and amateurish satire is little more than a series of scenes that seem to be created as vehicles for lame and often clichéd one-liners. Once Carson’s bullied his classmates (stereotypes one and all) into writing for him, he develops a soul and dispenses Dr. Phil–worthy advice to his victims—and he’s confused when they don’t thank him. Carson is so unlikable, so groundlessly conceited that when lightning literally does strike, readers who’ve made it that far may well applaud.
This sophomoric sophomore effort reads like a rough draft for a screenplay…which it may well be. (Fiction. 15-17)Pub Date: Nov. 20, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-23295-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 9, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
Busy, but at least there’s a death ray
A pair of teen detectives bops between London and Cairo in a steampunk adventure that would probably make a better movie than it does a book.
Octavia Nightingale and Sebastian Tweed return in this sequel to The Lazarus Machine (2012), solving mysteries in a Victorian London jam-packed with automatons powered by human souls and carriages running on Tesla turbines. Their search for Octavia’s kidnapped mother entangles them in a larger mystery, with missing scientists and Egyptophile cultists around every corner. Each solved puzzle reveals a further complication: traitors, lizard people, rocket launchers—even a secret world. Perhaps the number of threads is too many to keep under control; some characters are dropped abruptly, while one major arc comes to a character-building ending without ever developing through a beginning or middle. The overall mystery is impenetrable, but the set dressing of “vacuum tubes and wiring...tools and gears, clocks, glass beakers filled with strange liquids, and disassembled automatons” makes the right backdrop for a novel that climaxes with an airship-vs.-ornithopter dogfight over London. Purists take note: Among the myriad errors and inconsistencies are copious anachronisms detracting from the Victorian feel.
Busy, but at least there’s a death ray . (Steampunk. 15-17)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61614-857-7
Page Count: 295
Publisher: Pyr/Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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