It’ll take a sturdy reader not to keep flinching—or put this exercise in sensation down altogether.
Mean Girls with an occult twist.
Military kid Sofia Flores is used to moving around and always being on the outside, so she’s happy to be embraced by the queen bees in her new high school in tiny Friend, Mississippi. She is a little sorry that Riley and her posse seem to have it in for friendly Brooklyn, but she goes along with them. Though she’s been raised an unbeliever, her beloved grandmother, who lives with Sofia and her mom, is a devout Catholic; something in her responds when Riley decides to “save” her, baptizing her in the girls’ room. What she sees at a party sets off a horrific series of events that ends with maimed and dead teenagers. The bulk of the book takes place in a secret hideout in an abandoned development, and it is there that the girls viciously, bloodily confront Brooklyn, the proceedings causing Sofia to question all her moral certainties (and her immediate survival). The book comes with a “for mature audiences only” label, and refreshingly, this is not a warning about sex but about protracted, unrelenting and graphically described violence. Vega works in the occult element coyly, giving readers and Sofia only glimpses of what may or may not be supernatural evil—but there’s plenty of lovingly described, human-inflicted evil to keep strong-stomached readers occupied.
It’ll take a sturdy reader not to keep flinching—or put this exercise in sensation down altogether. (Horror. 16-18)Pub Date: June 12, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59514-7226
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Razorbill/Penguin
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
Much like building a bridge stone by stone, this read requires painstaking effort and patience.
Years after the death of their mother, the fourth son in an Australian family of five boys reconnects with his estranged father.
Matthew Dunbar dug up the old TW, the typewriter his father buried (along with a dog and a snake) in the backyard of his childhood home. He searched for it in order to tell the story of the family’s past, a story about his mother, who escaped from Eastern Europe before the fall of the Berlin Wall; about his father, who abandoned them all after their mother’s death; about his brother Clay, who built a bridge to reunite their family; and about a mule named Achilles. Zusak (The Book Thief, 2006, etc.) weaves a complex narrative winding through flashbacks. His prose is thick with metaphor and heavy with allusions to Homer’s epics. The story romanticizes Matthew and his brothers’ often violent and sometimes homophobic expressions of their cisgender, heterosexual masculinity with reflections unsettlingly reminiscent of a “boys will be boys” attitude. Women in the book primarily play the roles of love interests, mothers, or (in the case of their neighbor) someone to marvel at the Dunbar boys and give them jars to open. The characters are all presumably white.
Much like building a bridge stone by stone, this read requires painstaking effort and patience. (Fiction. 16-adult)Pub Date: Oct. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984830-15-9
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Aug. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Dreadful.
A 19-year-old junkie with delusions of grandeur falls for a 14-year-old prostitute in this poor approximation of a Chuck Palahniuk novel.
Drug addict and punk guitarist Alexander spends his days in a depressed Midwestern town drinking enough alcohol and smoking and shooting enough drugs to put down a bull elephant. Still, he manages to show up to band practice on time and woo Patti, a mullet-headed, song-writing Lolita whose motives are suspect from page one. Alexander believes that he and Patti will run away to New York and live druggily ever after. But after Patti’s drug dealer/pimp threatens to chop off his limbs with a chain saw and leave him to “these four rabid badgers that I keep… in a shack,” he has second thoughts. It's written like a bad rap song; readers will have four-letter-word fatigue within the first 20 pages—and there are still nearly 500 to go. The characters are flat, the constant drug use gratuitous and the graphic, occasionally violent sex scenes pornographic. By the time the author commits the cardinal sin of plugging one of his own previous titles within the text, readers will be too numb to care. Teens looking for gritty content are better off checking out the award-winning work of Adam Rapp or Ellen Hopkins.
Dreadful. (Fiction. 16 & up)Pub Date: June 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4424-4627-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
