An unevenly executed adventure story that celebrates the value of literature and unlikely friendship.
In Carrillo’s (The Improbable Rise of Paco Jones, 2016, etc.) YA novel, a teenager embarks upon a quest for vengeance but later learns important lessons from an unlikely teacher.
Nia, a 14-year-old Bulgarian-American teenager, runs away from her posh home in Sofia, Bulgaria, and boards a train to Berlin. Her mission is to make it to the German capital in time to follow through on a plan to get revenge on her two-timing ex-boyfriend, who’s staying in a hotel in the city. After reading The Count of Monte Cristo, Nia was inspired to brazenly seek out poetic justice of a similar variety in her love life. On the train to Berlin, she meets Kurt Chavez, an 89-year-old retired American schoolteacher who’s traveling to Budapest to execute a darkly romantic plan of his own. When someone attempts to rape Nia on the train, Kurt comes to her rescue, which leads to the pair becoming fugitives and unlikely travel companions. As the two help each other dodge arrest, the significance of their unlikely companionship materializes. Nia, the lonely daughter of wealthy parents going through a nasty divorce, finds mentorship in Kurt, while he, a lonely widower, reconnects to his appetite for adventure through Nia. But this relationship, while sweet, lacks authentic chemistry. Carrillo seems to use the dramatic circumstances of Nia and Kurt’s meeting to simply assume a bond between them instead of cultivating one. Further, Nia and Kurt seem like caricatures of adolescence and old age rather than fully developed characters. Kurt, for example, often provides comic relief with jokes about his age, calling himself an “old fart”; Nia, meanwhile, displays a clichéd understanding of elderly people: “ his old man-isms were hilarious. Who says dadgummit, oh dear, and tarnation?” That said, the pace is fast, and there’s rarely a dull moment; there’s juicy suspense in every subplot and plenty of close calls for the central duo.
An unevenly executed adventure story that celebrates the value of literature and unlikely friendship.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5489-7220-2
Page Count: 210
Publisher: CSP Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sophy and her mother live in an isolated Cambodian village. When the numbers man—the man who counts how many people live in the village—arrives, he realizes that her father has recently died, and noticing how she gazes at his sneakers, he decides to give her a gift: running shoes. He doesn’t know it, but now Sophy can go to school, even though it is a long journey from her village, because the shoes will protect her. After her mother gives permission, Sophy takes off—and meets with a group of male students who are not very happy to find a girl in their midst. But the teacher is kind and after a running race proves her prowess, Sophy is accepted. When the numbers man returns the following year, Sophy has learned enough to give him a gift of her own. Straightforward and accessible, this tale provides a memorable picture both of life in Cambodia and of one girl’s struggle to obtain an education. Gaillard’s realistic illustrations add a quiet, lyrical touch. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58089-175-2
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
A family copes with a daughter’s quirks in Walker’s fanciful, heartwarming tale of Asperger’s syndrome.
Like any new parents, Ben Long, a successful Hawaiian pediatrician, and his wife Francesca have high hopes for their first child. Their baby Mia has high hopes for them, too: as a yet-to-be-born spirit in heaven, she noticed Francesca’s kindness and patience and picked her out as her future mom. Mia relies on Francesca’s nurturing qualities because she will be born with Asperger’s syndrome, a mild, often undiagnosed variant of autism. Her parents find her to be a bright, precocious, musical child, but also shy, socially awkward, frightened by new situations and beset with food phobias. What seems to others to be mere eccentricity and cussedness is to Mia a rational response to her unusual cognitive traits. Mia is abnormally sensitive to stimuli: loud voices and bright lights hurt her ears and eyes, new clothes feel like sandpaper, perfume smells like tear gas. While she shrinks from these sensory assaults, her literal-mindedness makes her prone to obsessive anxieties: a news story about tainted hamburger leads to an epic school lunch-room battle and a bird’s nest collected by her grandmother strikes her as a nightmarish tangle of filth and decay. The author sets Mia’s first-person narrative within a larger family story told from Francesca’s point of view as she grapples with Ben’s exasperation over Mia’s problems, tussles with her difficult Chinese-American mother-in-law and weathers the heartache of her parents’ deaths. Writing with a limpid prose style deftly infused with medical research, Walker does a remarkable job illuminating Mia’s offbeat perspective from within; she makes it more a personality than an affliction. The book’s advocacy impulses occasionally overheat, as when Francesca goes ballistic over an incident in which mean girls tease Mia at school. Still, through Mia’s story, Walker dispels much of the mystery of Asperger’s kids while revealing the richness and promise of their lives. A poignant and enlightening coming-of-age saga.
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450260510
Page Count: 156
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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