An entertaining fantasy that nicely balances some ghostly melodrama with whimsy, teen wish fulfillment, and coming-of-age...
Death is no barrier to lesbian love in this YA supernatural romance.
Cassie is a shy, bookish New Orleans junior high student who feels alienated from her churchy parents and almost everything that goes on in school, especially the crushes her classmates are constantly gushing about. Her only real friend is Gem, a girl who looks about 15 years old; likes to wear a Boy Scout shirt, green skirt, and fishnets; and has haunted Cassie’s house for the two decades or so since she was murdered there in 1969. The schoolgirl and the ghost become soul mates and talk about everything, including Gem’s history with a girl named Daze, her “Hellcat” lover in reform school before their relationship ended in blood and fire. Cassie and Gem eventually come out to each other. After Cassie enters high school, they kindle a passion that progresses from making out to sex that is fully carnal (though demurely described) despite Gem’s lack of corporeal substance. Alas, the world just won’t let them be. After she slashes a homophobic bully and tells unbelieving adults about Gem, Cassie is packed off to Chose People Ministries, a coercive Christian therapeutic group that specializes in curing kids of gay sexuality and ghost delusions. There, she is subjected to aversive electroconvulsive treatments while viewing Sapphic pornography and pictures of specters. Jannerson’s (Thanks for Nothing, 2018, etc.) winsome yarn handles its magical realism in a vivid but matter-of-fact, no-jump-scare fashion, with the only horrors being those of religious intolerance and psychiatric abuse. Her treatment of gay sexuality is likewise positive and nonspooky. She nicely evokes the visceral wrongness Cassie feels dancing with a boy—“As the song progressed, Mackey’s hands drifted lower, and a nauseous lump formed in my throat”—and the giddy rightness she feels with Gem. The author at times brings a little too much maturity to the story: 13-year-old Cassie sometimes sounds like a 24-year-old graduate student—“both the activity and the actual notes felt, in the end, disingenuous,” she sighs when kids sign her seventh grade yearbook—and the third act bogs down in mundane relationship issues as college proves a direr threat than electroconvulsive therapy to Cassie and Gem’s love. Still, Jannerson’s appealing characters, deft prose, and psychological insights will hold readers’ attention.
An entertaining fantasy that nicely balances some ghostly melodrama with whimsy, teen wish fulfillment, and coming-of-age lessons.Pub Date: June 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-950412-89-1
Page Count: 229
Publisher: NineStar Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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