Heartfelt but inconsistent.
Eliza Marino’s family, lifelong residents of New Jersey’s Long Beach Island, lost nearly everything in a devastating hurricane.
Five years later, she and her friends are on a mission to preserve their coastal marshland as a habitat for turtles and other wildlife. A lifeguard and talented surfer, Eliza, 17, remains traumatized by the storm that nearly killed her little brother. She and her friends resent the seasonal residents whose oceanfront mansions replaced the modest homes that were destroyed. Ensuring the marshland is preserved is challenging, however. Spontaneously venting their frustration, the teens vandalize a giant home under construction. For Eliza, teaching Milo Harris, a handsome, wealthy, vacationing New Yorker, to surf proves a happy distraction. However, each keeps secrets that threaten their fledgling romance. Despite one character’s referencing Indigenous activists, the text does not consider the Indigenous people displaced by the islanders’ ancestors. Eliza’s dad works in construction, and the cafe her mom co-owns depends on tourists. Such conflicts, though depicted, aren’t explored in depth and are primarily framed in an interpersonal context. The novel’s strengths are Eliza’s compelling voice—her hurricane flashbacks are mesmerizing—and the conveying of emotion; it only lightly explores the theme of youth climate change activism and issues connected to it. Most characters read as White; several secondary characters are Latinx, and one is nonbinary.
Heartfelt but inconsistent. (author’s note, resources) (Verse novel. 12-18)Pub Date: July 19, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5476-0916-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2022
Poignant at times but ultimately a frustrating read.
Feeling increasingly isolated from the world, 16-year-old Declan Lynch falls for a girl whose voice he hears in his mind.
From a young age, Declan has heard voices in his head. Though his New Age–y mother tries to help him manage his situation, Declan constantly clashes with his science-driven (and extremely hostile) father because of it. The actual story kicks off when Declan begins to hear the voice of a girl named Rebecca. As she shows him visions of unfamiliar landscapes and people, Declan retreats further inward, fearing that their connection is weakening and thus becoming determined to meet the mysterious girl. Soon he flies to Ireland for answers and reconnects with his offbeat uncle Seamus. Choyce devotes much of the novel’s first half to defining Declan’s Irish roots, contrasting Declan’s immigrant father’s distaste for his homeland with Declan’s journey of self-discovery in Ireland. Declan scours the Irish seaside in hopes of finding a “thin place,” a sacred spot where the physical and spiritual worlds meet. Once he does find it—and Rebecca—the story takes a bizarre turn, ending on a beautifully melancholic note. However, occasionally stilted language pops in throughout the story to break the lyrical rhythm of the free-verse text. The romance element builds at an unbelievable pace, and the rather odd characterizations of mental health seem misplaced. More baffling still is the author’s choice to use the specter of a school shooting as a plot device to get Declan to Ireland.
Poignant at times but ultimately a frustrating read. (Verse fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4597-3957-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dundurn
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
Lifted beyond the confines of the problem novel with its lyricism and resonance.
Her life in upheaval, Ivy finds solace in controlling her caloric intake.
Ivy’s once-close family, all white, is coming apart. Her dad has a girlfriend, and her brother has also moved out. Now it’s just Ivy and her mother at home. But her mother is progressively disappearing into depression. So when her sophomore year starts, Ivy can’t wait to see her white best friend, Anna, who has just returned from Europe. But now Anna has a new best friend and a new beer pong pastime. Ivy is a “Smart Girl.” She adores math and trusts numbers for their constancy. She enters an arithmetic competition, but the weight of grief and loneliness sends her careening into obsessiveness. Ivy begins using numbers to control her life, viewing her growing eating disorder as an equation: “My body / is a function. / And I know / that the lower my x is / the less I put inside of me / the better / my output / will be.” The distinct quality of this topical novel is Ivy’s voice and composition. Written in evocative verse, with notes of wonder and despair, the cadence flows across and down the pages with grace: “I never knew silence / could take up a whole room: / sitting on all the chairs, / climbing up the stairway, / thick in the air like fog.”
Lifted beyond the confines of the problem novel with its lyricism and resonance. (Verse/fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: June 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-17372-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
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