A winner.
Readers don’t have to like football in order to love this book.
Wyatt couldn’t be more different from his older brother, Brett, the quarterback and football hero of a Massachusetts town struggling with a collapsing fishing industry and a red algae bloom. Their father embodies the luckless town’s obsession with the only consistently positive facet of life: high school football. Feeling anything but cool, Wyatt describes his own large physique in unflattering terms and is on the receiving end of most of his alcoholic father’s verbal abuse and neglect. As he struggles to align an accidental sports success with a secret his brother implores him to keep, Wyatt can’t decide whom to disappoint. In his brilliant debut, Kester links a litany of teenage woes with the yearning to escape a dying town and a dead-end life. Recognizable characters, locker room language, and guy humor accompany thorny ethical dilemmas. Buoyed by self-deprecating wit and rare insight, Wyatt endures the humiliations of fat shaming, taunting, bullying, and being the odd man out in a family of three males. The storyline plays both offense and defense with perfection while all-star resilience and a plucky best friend save our hero from a Gordian knot of a problem. Can the hero of a sports story be an overweight, ignored, nonathletic team mascot plucked from obscurity to land in the limelight? You bet! All characters are white.
A winner. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-30762-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
A powerful story of family, belonging, and identity interlaced with thriller elements.
A wary teen wonders if she should run when people come looking for her.
Lucy Smith was raised by her white father, who said little about her mother. Following his death and her stepmother’s abandonment, Lucy entered the foster care system at 14. Her stepmother revealed that Lucy’s birth mom was Native American, but her social worker urged her to keep that quiet. Battered by her time in the foster care system, it’s no wonder that 18-year-old Lucy is cautious when she’s approached by a man who says he’s an attorney who helps Native American foster kids connect with their families and communities. He introduces her to a friend who reveals to Lucy that she knows her Ojibwe maternal relatives—but a wary Lucy refuses her offer to learn more. Someone is stalking her, after all, and the FBI is investigating the bomb that went off in the diner where she worked—an event she’s sure targeted her. This stand-alone from bestseller Boulley, who’s an enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, includes characters her fans will recognize from previous works. The action scenes are mediated by ruminations on the failings of the foster care system and strong portrayals of Lucy’s relationship with her father and her complicated identity. Ardent book lover Lucy is a sympathetic narrator whose strong sense of justice is coupled with a deep acceptance of others.
A powerful story of family, belonging, and identity interlaced with thriller elements. (content warning, author’s note) (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 2, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328533
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
This grittily provocative debut explores the horrors of self-harm and the healing power of artistic expression.
After surviving a suicide attempt, a fragile teen isn't sure she can endure without cutting herself.
Seventeen-year-old Charlie Davis, a white girl living on the margins, thinks she has little reason to live: her father drowned himself; her bereft and abusive mother kicked her out; her best friend, Ellis, is nearly brain dead after cutting too deeply; and she's gone through unspeakable experiences living on the street. After spending time in treatment with other young women like her—who cut, burn, poke, and otherwise hurt themselves—Charlie is released and takes a bus from the Twin Cities to Tucson to be closer to Mikey, a boy she "like-likes" but who had pined for Ellis instead. But things don't go as planned in the Arizona desert, because sweet Mikey just wants to be friends. Feeling rejected, Charlie, an artist, is drawn into a destructive new relationship with her sexy older co-worker, a "semifamous" local musician who's obviously a junkie alcoholic. Through intense, diarylike chapters chronicling Charlie's journey, the author captures the brutal and heartbreaking way "girls who write their pain on their bodies" scar and mar themselves, either succumbing or surviving. Like most issue books, this is not an easy read, but it's poignant and transcendent as Charlie breaks more and more before piecing herself back together.
This grittily provocative debut explores the horrors of self-harm and the healing power of artistic expression. (author’s note) (Fiction. 14 & up)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-93471-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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