Mikey and Margalo, Voigt’s redoubtable Bad Girls (1996—and Bad, Badder, Baddest, 1997), return for a third wickedly satisfying outing. The girls have just entered junior high school, only to find that all the social rules have changed and their reputations as the baddest of the bad count for nothing. After a brief, disastrous campaign for popularity, Mikey settles back into her old surly, splendidly singular self. Margalo finds it harder to resist the allure of popularity or at least the illusion thereof: “If it was a sickness, wanting to be liked, wanting to fit in and mix in, then Margalo had it. But not, she realized, because she wanted to be popular. What she actually wanted was people thinking she was popular . . . .” The plot meanders somewhat from scheme to scheme—one plan involves getting Mikey on the tennis team by petitioning to allow seventh-graders on the basketball team—but what drives the story is the growing tension between the two best friends as Margalo quietly courts popularity while trying to remain loyal to the one person who knows her best. Voigt is anthropological in her observation of junior-high-school social structure (the girls navigate among the Heathers, the arty-smarties, the jockettes, and the Barbies), and she captures perfectly the gnawing uncertainty of a not-so-popular student’s place in it. It will come as no great surprise to Mikey and Margalo’s fans that they triumph in the end—with badness intact—but that is almost incidental to the oh-so-naughty fun of watching how they get to it. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-689-82473-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Anne Schwartz/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2000
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
Namioka (Den of the White Fox, 1997, etc.) offers readers a glimpse of the ritual of foot-binding, and a surprising heroine whose life is determined by her rejection of that ritual. Ailin is spirited—her family thinks uncontrollable—even at age five, in her family’s compound in China in 1911, she doesn’t want to have her feet bound, especially after Second Sister shows Ailin her own bound feet and tells her how much it hurts. Ailin can see already how bound feet will restrict her movements, and prevent her from running and playing. Her father takes the revolutionary step of permitting her to leave her feet alone, even though the family of Ailin’s betrothed then breaks off the engagement. Ailin goes to the missionary school and learns English; when her father dies and her uncle cuts off funds for tuition, she leaves her family to become a nanny for an American missionary couple’s children. She learns all the daily household chores that were done by servants in her own home, and finds herself, painfully, cut off from her own culture and separate from the Americans. At 16, she decides to go with the missionaries when they return to San Francisco, where she meets and marries another Chinese immigrant who starts his own restaurant. The metaphor of things bound and unbound is a ribbon winding through this vivid narrative; the story moves swiftly, while Ailin is a brave and engaging heroine whose difficult choices reflect her time and her gender. (Fiction. 9-14)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-32666-1
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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