A well-meaning if sometimes muddled story of one teen’s efforts to break free of parentification.
Sometimes, being “the responsible one” takes a toll.
Ever since her older brother started college, 15-year-old Giddy has been expected to care for her three younger siblings. From getting them up and on the bus in the mornings to fixing dinner and ensuring their homework gets done, Giddy does it all. She can’t remember the last time she smiled, her stomach constantly burns, and she’s exhausted. She sees a post on an alternative medicine forum about “opposition therapy”—a term coined by the poster for their experiment in reversing their habits and doing something unexpected each day. Intrigued, Giddy begins her own trial to see whether 11 days of doing the opposite of what everyone expects of her will snap her out of her grayness. Her new behaviors quickly grab the attention of her family, teachers, and peers. The level of detail that debut author Havranek provides about Giddy’s thought processes behind each choice bogs down the story’s flow. Giddy’s mother, an overworked nurse, is impatient for her oldest daughter to go back to the way she was. Not until a tragic accident does her mother show true remorse for the weight she’s put on Giddy. While Giddy ultimately realizes on her own that she needs therapy, there’s a missed opportunity in not further addressing mental health ramifications within the story or in backmatter. Major characters are cued white.
A well-meaning if sometimes muddled story of one teen’s efforts to break free of parentification. (Fiction. 12-18)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2024
ISBN: 9781682637142
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Peachtree Teen
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away.
A Mexican American boy takes on heavy responsibilities when his family is torn apart.
Mateo’s life is turned upside down the day U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents show up unsuccessfully seeking his Pa at his New York City bodega. The Garcias live in fear until the day both parents are picked up; his Pa is taken to jail and his Ma to a detention center. The adults around Mateo offer support to him and his 7-year-old sister, Sophie, however, he knows he is now responsible for caring for her and the bodega as well as trying to survive junior year—that is, if he wants to fulfill his dream to enter the drama program at the Tisch School of the Arts and become an actor. Mateo’s relationships with his friends Kimmie and Adam (a potential love interest) also suffer repercussions as he keeps his situation a secret. Kimmie is half Korean (her other half is unspecified) and Adam is Italian American; Mateo feels disconnected from them, less American, and with worries they can’t understand. He talks himself out of choosing a safer course of action, a decision that deepens the story. Mateo’s self-awareness and inner monologue at times make him seem older than 16, and, with significant turmoil in the main plot, some side elements feel underdeveloped. Aleman’s narrative joins the ranks of heart-wrenching stories of migrant families who have been separated.
An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5605-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting, brutal and beautifully told.
A devastating tale of greed and secrets springs from the summer that tore Cady’s life apart.
Cady Sinclair’s family uses its inherited wealth to ensure that each successive generation is blond, beautiful and powerful. Reunited each summer by the family patriarch on his private island, his three adult daughters and various grandchildren lead charmed, fairy-tale lives (an idea reinforced by the periodic inclusions of Cady’s reworkings of fairy tales to tell the Sinclair family story). But this is no sanitized, modern Disney fairy tale; this is Cinderella with her stepsisters’ slashed heels in bloody glass slippers. Cady’s fairy-tale retellings are dark, as is the personal tragedy that has led to her examination of the skeletons in the Sinclair castle’s closets; its rent turns out to be extracted in personal sacrifices. Brilliantly, Lockhart resists simply crucifying the Sinclairs, which might make the family’s foreshadowed tragedy predictable or even satisfying. Instead, she humanizes them (and their painful contradictions) by including nostalgic images that showcase the love shared among Cady, her two cousins closest in age, and Gat, the Heathcliff-esque figure she has always loved. Though increasingly disenchanted with the Sinclair legacy of self-absorption, the four believe family redemption is possible—if they have the courage to act. Their sincere hopes and foolish naïveté make the teens’ desperate, grand gesture all that much more tragic.
Riveting, brutal and beautifully told. (Fiction. 14 & up)Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-74126-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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