A great young-adult novel—as it should be billed.
Plucky pre-teen breaks out of fat camp and embarks upon a cross-country adventure in search of her late-night TV idol.
Adolescence doesn’t hold much promise for 13-year-old Sunnie Sundstrom. She’s sandwiched between a sullen older sister and an overachieving younger brother, her classmates tease her mercilessly and it often seems like her mother won’t love her anymore if she doesn’t drop 18 pounds by the end of eighth grade. The only people who seem to see past Sunnie’s “Huskies for Her” jeans are her beloved Grannie Lassen and Johnny Carson, who makes her nights a bit less lonely. Things promise only to get worse when Grannie suddenly dies and Sunnie is shuttled off to the dreaded “Summer Slim-Down Retreat.” Much to her surprise, though, she finds herself making real friends for the first time, and an unexpected visit from the Pentecostal Bible Camp across the lake brings a handsome boy named Asher Gideon into her life. After an Asher-inspired prank gets her kicked out of camp, Sunnie’s newfound confidence kicks in. She trades her bus ticket back home to suburban Milwaukee for one to Los Angeles, where she vows to meet her hero. Though she clearly faces obstacles along the way, including an old man with unsavory intentions, persistence pays off and Sunnie comes to realize exactly how far she’s come. Sunnie navigates the world with grit and gumption, even if she’s the last person to realize it, and her ugly-duckling story will resonate with teenagers who aren’t sure they like what they see in the mirror. But for adults more removed from the injustices of middle school, the sweet premise and likable narrator won’t quite be enough.
A great young-adult novel—as it should be billed.Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2006
ISBN: 1-57962-125-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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