An ambitious failure.
Three best friends spend the night before graduation in a run-down movie house.
Bertucci, Olivia, and Codman have been best friends all through high school, and on the eve of their graduation, the trio agrees to spend their final hours as high school students locked in the recently boarded-up Circle Cinema. In these few hours, truths are revealed, hearts are torn open, and futures are decided upon. These ambitions ultimately sink the novel. The enterprise is burdened with overthought dialogue, clumsy metaphors, and what comes across as a desperate desire to be seen as adult. The novel switches narrative perspective from teen to teen at the beginning of every chapter, but the device is unsuccessful: these characters all sound and think the same. These attributes almost make the book work as thematic commentary on the nature of teenage friendship, but unfortunately it doesn’t go much beyond the obvious observation that teens tend to think like their friends and are desperate to escape childhood. Throw in a half-baked love triangle and an apparent attempt to ape John Green and David Levithan's "Schrodinger's cat" metaphor from Will Grayson, Will Grayson (2010)—a metaphor that even that book barely pulled off—and you have a book that has all the hallmarks of a smart, sensitive book for teens but without the necessary nuance or emotional excitement.
An ambitious failure. (Fiction. 14-16)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4677-7489-5
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Carolrhoda Lab
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers who relish self-indulgent inner monologue and expect dramatic arguments, seething resentment, tearful heartbreak,...
A “good girl” experiences an unplanned pregnancy and its aftermath.
Evelyn is a classic good girl, earning top grades and excelling in the art studio as well as on the track. When her parents start paying more attention to their acrimoniously crumbling marriage than to their daughter, she punishes them by becoming drinking, drugging, sex-having Bad Evelyn. Unfortunately, Bad Evelyn’s exploits become a punishment for her, too, as her protection-free sex with Todd leads to an unplanned pregnancy. Evelyn’s situation is the stuff of classic YA problem novels: What will she do about her pregnancy? How will she live with her choices? Will her heart, in fact, go on? Fearing expulsion from her competitive and deeply conservative Catholic high school, Evelyn relocates to Chicago to live with her aunts Linda and Nora and their daughters while she makes her choices and protects her GPA. Evelyn is a tough nut to crack, and she’s not particularly likable, but through all her self-contradictory crabbiness and emotionally withholding fears, readers may see someone recognizably real. First-time author Carter drags her narrative out, making readers angst along with Evelyn as she chronicles every week of her pregnancy and beyond.
Pub Date: Feb. 26, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59990-958-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If Becky actually were a manic pixie dream girl, there’d at least be some whimsy breaking up the dragging, self-centered,...
Nothing gives a boy moral superiority like being awkwardly aroused by the least popular girl in high school.
Tyler’s friends call him “jerk,” “idiot,” “dick” and “asshead.” Could he possibly be that bad? Is it that much of a problem that he’s been dating sweet Sydney Barrett for years while crushing hard on friendless Becky Webb, shunned by everyone else in school for being the town slut? In a narrative that interleaves exposition-heavy flashbacks with his present (wasted in the park, drunk on butterscotch-pudding shooters), Tyler describes the history of his relationship with Becky. Perhaps that should be his nonrelationship, because he has spent years being unkind to Sydney while gazing dreamily at Becky’s tattoo from across the cafeteria. Tyler’s tortured overtures to Becky would be more believably redemptive if he didn’t share in his classmates’ double standard of shaming, needing to find a reason for Becky’s sexual activities before he can find her worthy. Tyler, apparently, deserves a medal for choosing not to have meaningless sex with a suffering friend; what a hero.
If Becky actually were a manic pixie dream girl, there’d at least be some whimsy breaking up the dragging, self-centered, deeply unkind angst . (Fiction. 14-16)Pub Date: April 23, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-375-87005-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2013
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