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
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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