A tale where the heroine’s experiences as a grieving daughter and sister seem far more meaningful than any family secrets.
A teenager must unravel the mysteries behind her family’s many tragedies in this first installment of a YA trilogy.
Anastasia Phoenix has had more than her fair share of uncertainty and misfortune. Her parents were biochemical engineers who created the Dresden Chemical Corporation with their best friend. But their work meant they often dragged Anastasia and her older sister, Keira, from country to country, never settling in one place for long. After Anastasia finds out that they plan to uproot the family again mere months after settling in Boston, she refuses to move. She gets her wish in the worst way possible: her parents die, leaving her Keira’s ward and ensuring she won’t be relocating soon. Now, three years later, Anastasia is 17, and Keira has disappeared after a party. Though the crime scene contains enough blood that it seems doubtful that Keira survived, Anastasia is sure she is alive. Anastasia finds evidence pointing her toward an Italian family that knows her parents—and suggests that there is more to their deaths than she realizes. Along with Marcus Rey, an attractive new student and son of Dresden Chemical employees, she travels to Italy to try to discover information about her family. While there, she learns about her parents’ clandestine past. But the more she unearths, the more she apprehends that few people in her life are who she thinks they are. Though Rodriguez Wallach (Mirror, Mirror, 2013, etc.) spices up her novel with exotic locales and intriguing love interests, the tale is ultimately more predictable than exciting. In trying to give her audience hints, the author overemphasizes certain clues and characters until readers have almost certainly guessed plot twists many chapters before they are meant to be revealed. Anastasia also emerges as an uneven character, teetering between believable—as a grieving, bullheaded teenager trying to navigate the guilt of enjoying a new crush while also investigating her sister and parents—and too good to be true. She’s fluent in four languages, a karate black belt, able to identify someone’s city of origin by hearing the person speak a single word, and lucky to have a twentysomething roommate who can hack police databases in under an hour.
A tale where the heroine’s experiences as a grieving daughter and sister seem far more meaningful than any family secrets.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63375-608-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Entangled Teen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
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