An entertaining adventure with a mystery at the center.
A YA novel tells the story of a high school sleuth on the trail of a mysterious vigilante.
Ridgeview High School newspaper reporter Owen Dinsmore comes across noted bully Trevor Newsome right after the brute falls down the school stairs. Owen asks who pushed him, but Trevor is only able to say “Ro” (or is it “Robe”?) before losing consciousness. Nearby, Owen notices Erica Litvak, “probably the smartest student in the whole school and someone he found irresistibly attractive. Did she push Trevor down the stairs?” It falls to the new principal, Wilma Allan—who happens to be Owen’s aunt—to find Trevor’s attacker, and she decides to delegate the job to none other than her investigative journalist of a nephew. Owen already suspects that he saw Michael DeVere at the top of the staircase, the same student whom Trevor tormented with a swirly a few weeks before. The only other thing Owen has to go on is the fact that, when Trevor wakes up at the hospital, he identifies his attacker as a robot with a big metal arm. Owen begins to investigate the school’s robotics program, but mostly he’s excited for an excuse to spend more time with Erica. She agrees to accompany him to the Center of Science and Discovery, and she even gives him a kiss at the end of the date. Owen suspects that Michael may be obsessed with Erica. But the students don’t seem capable of building a robot strong enough to push Trevor down the steps. Then another bully in school is attacked, and this time the culprit is caught in the act: a foot-tall robot wearing a cardboard sign that reads “The Bullybuster.” Could a robot really be responsible for all the trouble? And who built it? And why? Cormany’s (Fast-Pitch Love, 2014) prose is colorful and generally light, replete with all the joys and anxieties of adolescence: “That’s when it hit him. What’s Erica’s phone number? He forgot to ask her! Despair punched him in the stomach like an iron fist. How stupid and careless of him!” While the premise sets up Owen as a hallway-wise junior gumshoe out to solve a ridiculous crime, the book’s atmosphere is more sincere than jokey, and the pacing is actually rather staid. The author uses the page space to skillfully build up his characters, and it is their relationships that drive the story more than the machinations of the plot. Some of the teenage boys talk like old men—Owen at one point claims to have “plenty of dough” to buy ice cream while his friend asks him if he’s “going with Erica now”—but Ridgeview is recognizable enough to draw readers in. Apart from a somewhat tone-deaf evocation of the Holocaust to explain one student’s personal aversion to bullying, the novel provides a fun take on the bully revenge fantasy that YA readers should enjoy.
An entertaining adventure with a mystery at the center.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-79064-403-2
Page Count: 255
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.
Hilderbrand’s latest cautionary tale exposes the toxic—and hilarious—impact of gossip on even the most sophisticated of islands.
Eddie and Grace Pancik are known for their beautiful Nantucket home and grounds, financed with the profits from Eddie’s thriving real estate company (thriving before the crash of 2008, that is). Grace raises pedigreed hens and, with the help of hunky landscape architect Benton Coe, has achieved a lush paradise of fowl-friendly foliage. The Panciks’ teenage girls, Allegra and Hope, suffer invidious comparisons of their looks and sex appeal, although they're identical twins. The Panciks’ friends the Llewellyns (Madeline, a blocked novelist, and her airline-pilot husband, Trevor) invested $50,000, the lion’s share of Madeline’s last advance, in Eddie’s latest development. But Madeline, hard-pressed to come up with catalog copy, much less a new novel, is living in increasingly straightened circumstances, at least by Nantucket standards: she can only afford $2,000 per month on the apartment she rents in desperate hope that “a room of her own” will prime the creative pump. Construction on Eddie’s spec houses has stalled, thanks to the aforementioned crash. Grace, who has been nursing a crush on Benton for some time, gives in and a torrid affair ensues, which she ill-advisedly confides to Madeline after too many glasses of Screaming Eagle. With her agent and publisher dropping dire hints about clawing back her advance and Eddie “temporarily” unable to return the 50K, what’s a writer to do but to appropriate Grace’s adultery as fictional fodder? When Eddie is seen entering her apartment (to ask why she rented from a rival realtor), rumors spread about him and Madeline, and after the rival realtor sneaks a look at Madeline’s rough draft (which New York is hotly anticipating as “the Playboy Channel meets HGTV”), the island threatens to implode with prurient snark. No one is spared, not even Hilderbrand herself, “that other Nantucket novelist,” nor this magazine, “the notoriously cranky Kirkus.”
Once again, Hilderbrand displays her gift for making us care most about her least likable characters.Pub Date: June 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-316-33452-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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