In a Reno suburb, expectations take heavy tolls. Trying to excel at baseball and get into Stanford, Sean takes steroids and...
While not razor-edged like her previous work, Hopkins’ portrait of four 12th-graders who are expected to be perfect will nonetheless keep teens up all night reading.
In a Reno suburb, expectations take heavy tolls. Trying to excel at baseball and get into Stanford, Sean takes steroids and spirals into rage and rape. Kendra does pageants but wants to model, so she schedules plastic surgery and stops eating. Andre takes dance lessons in secret, funding them with money that his wealthy, status-conscious parents give him for fashionable sweaters. Cara seems faultless at everything from cheerleading to grades, but she’s falling in love with a girl. The four first-person narrations are set in different type and have mildly different styles, but the free verse lacks Hopkins’ trademark sharp, searing brittleness. However, the less-sharp tone works here, because these characters are more depressed than dissociated. The ostensible focus on perfection is a coping mechanism against families that are absent, cold and brutally silent, so the consequences—anorexia, drugs, booze, rape, delusion, deception—all ring true. It also rings true that some characters buckle, worst off at the story’s end, while others find themselves and may make it.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4169-8324-8
Page Count: 640
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
SEEN & HEARD
An uneven read that ultimately misses its mark.
Even as her own soul hovers in the “middle” space, her body barely clinging to life in a hospital room, 18-year-old Crow’s thoughts are consumed with protecting her sister.
When given the chance to go on a “walkabout”—an opportunity to revisit her life and make things right—Crow learns that there may have been another side to the people and events that defined her. The only catch is that she must return as someone other than herself. It’s an interesting-enough premise, and the first half of the book will likely live up to readers’ expectations. A skillfully crafted and strikingly bleak Minnesota is the perfect backdrop for Crow’s desperate attempts to save her sister from their stepfather’s lascivious eye. Their mother’s unwillingness to acknowledge this potential threat is both maddening and chillingly believable. Unfortunately, the second half of the novel falls disappointingly short. Here, Crow’s gender-bending return to her past as a young man muddies the waters and distracts from the plot, as does a disturbing side story about Crow’s relationship with her friend Basil. Frequent references to Crow’s passion for philosophy are not followed through in the text, and Crow’s obsession with protecting her sister never allows adequate room for Crow to truly discover herself.
An uneven read that ultimately misses its mark. (Fantasy. 14-17)Pub Date: April 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-14-241229-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
Memorable.
Haunting, colorful environments distinguish this debut novel about a girl fighting for survival in the far future.
Ava lives on the Parastrata. She knows nothing beyond her polygamous, fundamentalist religion, whose followers began living in spaceships some 1,000 years ago and which holds women as property since they harbor an interest in Earth “like a soft, rotten spot in [their] souls.” Informed that she’s marrying a man on another ship, Ava’s thrilled to see Luck, a boy she met years ago, in the greeting party. They know they should wait until after their wedding, but they sneak into a desalination pool and succumb to sex the night before—and get caught. To their shock (though not readers’), Ava was actually promised to Luck’s father. The Parastrata women wash Ava and lock her in a chilled room to await her punishment: Being pushed out into open space, which is, of course, fatal. A difficult, terrifying escape and a relative’s sacrifice provide another chance, but where can she go? From the strained peculiarity of the Parastrata to a sunbaked community afloat on the Pacific Ocean to the bustle of Mumbai, Duncan’s settings and diction are vivid. As brown-skinned people become Ava’s chosen family, she learns that her own medium-dark skin—mocked aboard the Parastrata—isn’t a religious stain, marking this a welcome browning of the science-fiction universe. Ava’s decisions sometimes serve plot more than characterization, but readers caught up in the story will forgive this.
Memorable. (Science fiction. 14-17)Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-222014-1
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
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