A strange and fluffy confection with a thought-provoking core.
Working for a newspaper changes a misfit girl’s life in many ways in Giroux’s novel.
Pennacook, Massachusetts, is a town beset by constant floods in which menacing wild boars roam the streets/canals, people ride balance-bikes or pedal boats, and grocery store robots have banded together in the woods. Readers meet the novel’s protagonist, Wendy Zhou, during her difficult middle school years—Wendy’s father has recently died, no one in Pennacook can pronounce her last name, and her coming out as gay during a school dance goes disastrously wrong when her crush rejects and insults her. Writing for the Pennacook Beat newspaper gives Wendy a purpose, and she and the other kid reporters in her school-sponsored program uncover a case of corruption revealing the reasons for the floods and hordes of feral pigs—and the truth behind an idealistic-sounding scheme to cover the town with a giant dome. Interspersed with teen Wendy’s exploits are depictions of Wendy in the year 2032 as she nears college graduation. Both Wendy and her Pennacook Beat editor, Graham Bundt, are flawed characters, but the author makes them likable by showing their growth. Graham has a drinking problem and allows the newspaper to be co-opted for propaganda, but he’s worth redemption—he inspires kids to write and cares about the town he inhabits. Wendy can be unkind to her mom; she’s also an unreliable narrator, revealing late in the story that she has lied about some of her personal details. Still, the reader is on Wendy’s side when she learns to care deeply for someone and discovers her own strength. Though the story is frothy, Giroux embeds many serious themes in the narrative, including self-acceptance, suicide, sexuality, and racism. The book also convincingly explores the fragility of democracy, which is threatened in Pennacook. As Graham observes, quoting his hero, John Adams, “There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”
A strange and fluffy confection with a thought-provoking core.Pub Date: June 18, 2024
ISBN: 9781734224047
Page Count: 306
Publisher: New Salem Books
Review Posted Online: April 23, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.
Tremendous in scope—tremendous in depth of penetration—and as different a Steinbeck as the Steinbeck of Burning Bright was from the Steinbeck of The Grapes of Wrath.
Here is no saga of the underprivileged—no drama of social significance. Tenderness, which some felt was inherent in everything Steinbeck wrote, is muted almost to the vanishing point in this story of conflict within character, impact of character on character, of circumstances on personalities, of the difficult acceptance of individual choice as against the dominance of inherited traits. The philosophy is intimately interwoven with the pace of story, as he follows-from New England to California over some fifty odd years-the two families which hold stage center. There are the Trasks, brothers in two generations, strangely linked, strangely at war the one with the other; there are the Hamiltons (John Steinbeck's own forebears), a unique Irish born couple, the man an odd lovable sort of genius who never capitalizes on his ideas for himself, the tiny wife, tart, cold-and revealing now and again unexpected gentleness of spirit, the burgeoning family, as varied a tribe as could be found. And- on the periphery but integral to the deepening philosophy which motivates the story, there is the wise Chinese servant scholar and gentleman, who submerges his own goals to identify himself wholly with the needs of the desolate Adam Trask, crushed by his soulless wife's desertion, and the twin boys, Cal, violent, moody, basically strong enough to be himself—and Aron, gentle, unwilling to face disagreeable facts, beloved by all who met him. In counterpoint, the story follows too the murky career of Adam's wife, Cathy—who came to him from a mysteriously clouded past, and returned to a role for which she was suited—as a costly whore, and later as Madame in Salinas most corrupt "house," where the perversions of sex ridden males were catered to—and cruelty capitalized upon.Shock techniques applied with rapier and not bludgeon will rule the book out for the tender-skinned.
But John Steinbeck, the philosopher, dominates his material and brings it into sharply moral focus.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 1952
ISBN: 0142004235
Page Count: 616
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1952
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
