A good-hearted road trip stalls on thin secondary characterizations.
Ever since the accident that killed her mother and two sisters five years ago, Coyote Sunrise, now 12, and her father, Rodeo, have lived on the road in a converted yellow school bus and followed their whims.
The only place they will not go is back to their hometown…until Coyote’s grandma tells her the park where she, her mother, and her sisters buried a memory box is slated for destruction in just a few days. Now she must figure out how to steer her father back. In true road-trip–novel fashion, Coyote manages with the help of strangers: Lester, a jilted musician; Salvador and his mother, fleeing domestic abuse; and teenage Val, kicked out because she’s gay. Gemeinhart crafts an enormously appealing protagonist in Coyote, who has mostly adapted to her unusual life but whose yearning for stability pokes out in small ways. Her narrative voice is rich and memorable, her withering distaste for Wild Watermelon slushes just one of many personality-defining quirks. But if Coyote is a living, breathing protagonist, the secondary cast is less so. That Coyote and her father are white makes Coyote’s enlistment of Lester, an endlessly amiable black man, as a second driver an uncomfortable choice—a literal plot device, in fact. Latinx Salvador is more fully drawn, perhaps because he and Coyote interact as peers, but his mother is not. Like Lester, she and Val (who is white) fade into the background till needed.
A good-hearted road trip stalls on thin secondary characterizations. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-19670-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Fast-paced and plot-driven.
In his latest, prolific author Gratz takes on Hitler’s Olympic Games.
When 13-year-old American gymnast Evie Harris arrives in Berlin to compete in the 1936 Olympic Games, she has one goal: stardom. If she can bring home a gold medal like her friend, the famous equestrian-turned-Hollywood-star Mary Brooks, she might be able to lift her family out of their Dust Bowl poverty. But someone slips a strange note under Evie’s door, and soon she’s dodging Heinz Fischer, the Hitler Youth member assigned to host her, and meeting strangers who want to make use of her gymnastic skills—to rob a bank. As the games progress, Evie begins to see the moral issues behind their sparkling facade—the antisemitism and racism inherent in Nazi ideology and the way Hitler is using the competition to support and promote these beliefs. And she also agrees to rob the bank. Gratz goes big on the Mission Impossible–style heist, which takes center stage over the actual competitions, other than Jesse Owens’ famous long jump. A lengthy and detailed author’s note provides valuable historical context, including places where Gratz adapted the facts for storytelling purposes (although there’s no mention of the fact that before 1952, Olympic equestrian sports were limited to male military officers). With an emphasis on the plot, many of the characters feel defined primarily by how they’re suffering under the Nazis, such as the fictional diver Ursula Diop, who was involuntarily sterilized for being biracial.
Fast-paced and plot-driven. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781338736106
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2025
Entrancing and uplifting.
A small dog, the elderly woman who owns him, and a homeless girl come together to create a tale of serendipity.
Piper, almost 12, her parents, and her younger brother are at the bottom of a long slide toward homelessness. Finally in a family shelter, Piper finds that her newfound safety gives her the opportunity to reach out to someone who needs help even more. Jewel, mentally ill, lives in the park with her dog, Baby. Unwilling to leave her pet, and forbidden to enter the shelter with him, she struggles with the winter weather. Ree, also homeless and with a large dog, helps when she can, but after Jewel gets sick and is hospitalized, Baby’s taken to the animal shelter, and Ree can’t manage the complex issues alone. It’s Piper, using her best investigative skills, who figures out Jewel’s backstory. Still, she needs all the help of the shelter Firefly Girls troop that she joins to achieve her accomplishment: to raise enough money to provide Jewel and Baby with a secure, hopeful future and, maybe, with their kindness, to inspire a happier story for Ree. Told in the authentic alternating voices of loving child and loyal dog, this tale could easily slump into a syrupy melodrama, but Pyron lets her well-drawn characters earn their believable happy ending, step by challenging step, by reaching out and working together. Piper, her family, and Jewel present white; Pyron uses hair and naming convention, respectively, to cue Ree as black and Piper’s friend Gabriela as Latinx.
Entrancing and uplifting. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-283922-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
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