Filled with the whining and pining of a sophomore girl’s diary and sadly lacking in substance.
Chloe Snow’s freshman year was characterized by highs and lows, and her sophomore year is shaping up to offer much of the same.
Last year, Chloe was the lead in the school musical and received the occasional attention of an older guy. She also grew apart from her best friend and suffered a bout of intense cyberbullying, all while her flaky mother trotted off to Mexico and her parents’ marriage fell apart. The series’ second installment reads like a watered-down version of the first. Chloe’s mother is still in Mexico, occasionally popping up in Chloe’s inbox to wreak emotional havoc. Her relationship with her best friend is once again strained. Mean-girl bullying rears its ugly head again, this time in person. Chloe continues to drop in moments of social awareness acknowledging her many privileges as a “straight, white, upper-middle-class person,” but she immediately discards such realizations, returning to her own self-absorbed drama. The biggest change is that she spends this year obsessing over a younger guy with a girlfriend instead of an older one. Those who loved Chloe’s first diary may enjoy reading much of the same again, but the narrative offers little to anyone else.
Filled with the whining and pining of a sophomore girl’s diary and sadly lacking in substance. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-8878-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember.
Kai’s life is upended when his coastal village is devastated in Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami in this verse novel from an author who experienced them firsthand.
With his single mother, her parents, and his friend Ryu among the thousands missing or dead, biracial Kai, 17, is dazed and disoriented. His friend Shin’s supportive, but his intact family reminds Kai, whose American dad has been out of touch for years, of his loss. Kai’s isolation is amplified by his uncertain cultural status. Playing soccer and his growing friendship with shy Keiko barely lessen his despair. Then he’s invited to join a group of Japanese teens traveling to New York to meet others who as teenagers lost parents in the 9/11 attacks a decade earlier. Though at first reluctant, Kai agrees to go and, in the process, begins to imagine a future. Like graphic novels, today’s spare novels in verse (the subgenre concerning disasters especially) are significantly shaped by what’s left out. Lacking art’s visceral power to grab attention, verse novels may—as here—feel sparsely plotted with underdeveloped characters portrayed from a distance in elegiac monotone. Kai’s a generic figure, a coat hanger for the disaster’s main event, his victories mostly unearned; in striking contrast, his rural Japanese community and how they endure catastrophe and overwhelming losses—what they do and don’t do for one another, comforts they miss, kindnesses they value—spring to life.
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember. (author preface, afterword) (Verse fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-53474-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
Refreshing and moving: avoids easy answers and saviors from the outside.
From Sudan to Maine, in free verse.
It's 1999 in Juba, and the second Sudanese civil war is in full swing. Viola is a Bari girl, and she lives every day in fear of the government soldiers occupying her town. In brief free-verse chapters, Viola makes Juba real: the dusty soil, the memories of sweetened condensed milk, the afternoons Viola spends braiding her cousin's hair. But there is more to Juba than family and hunger; there are the soldiers, and the danger, and the horrifying interactions with soldiers that Viola doesn't describe but only lets the reader infer. As soon as possible, Viola's mother takes the family to Cairo and then to Portland, Maine—but they won't all make it. First one and then another family member is brought down by the devastating war and famine. After such a journey, the culture shock in Portland is unsurprisingly overwhelming. "Portland to New York: 234 miles, / New York to Cairo: 5,621 miles, / Cairo to Juba: 1,730 miles." Viola tries to become an American girl, with some help from her Sudanese friends, a nice American boy and the requisite excellent teacher. But her mother, like the rest of the Sudanese elders, wants to run her home as if she were back in Juba, and the inevitable conflict is heartbreaking.
Refreshing and moving: avoids easy answers and saviors from the outside. (historical note) (Fiction. 13-15)Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7614-6267-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
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