Skip this uneven collection’s slighter offerings; its best are worth finding.
This wide-ranging anthology features adoptees, foster-care veterans, trauma survivors, young birth mothers, adoptive parents, and those whose lives they touch.
Contemporary realism, science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction: these 29 stories cover complicated territory. In adoption, happiness is inextricably bound to sorrow, even when birth parents put their child’s welfare ahead of their own, even when adoptee and adoptive parents form a loving bond. In Caela Carter’s luminous story, an African-American teen, a gifted student and athlete, must tell her beloved mother, whom she visits in prison, that her track coach and foster mother wants to adopt her; being gifted a life her mother couldn’t provide is a bitter joy. In Julie Leung’s “Ink Drips Black,” the bond connecting a Chinese grandmother and her American-adopted granddaughter, Stacy, is sacrifice. The high price paid for Stacy’s future is loss of family and culture. Elsewhere, a veteran of multiple placements dreads removal from the warm, welcoming foster family she’s bonded with; an adoptive family invites the young birth mother who made their family possible to remain part of it. Too many less-impressive stories offer a conventional outsider’s view of adoption—adoption by generous, loving parents as the happy ending to years of birthparent abuse or neglect. The best, however, reflect the bittersweet truths that adoptive families differ profoundly from biological ones and that coming to terms with these differences is a lifelong process.
Skip this uneven collection’s slighter offerings; its best are worth finding. (Short stories. 12-16)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63583-004-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flux
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
Unabashedly didactic, but moving nonetheless.
A slacker learns life lessons from a slam-poet classmate in an inspiring if overly optimistic school story.
Grunge-rock devotee Sam has been trying to avoid the attention of teachers and other students ever since his mom left town two years earlier. Then the equally quiet Luis Cárdenas arrives in Sam’s English class, and meddlesome Ms. Cassidy seats the two of them together. Rumors fly about Luis: His brother is an infamous gangster, and there is a mean-looking scar on Luis’ neck. Sam doesn’t see Luis’ true colors until Ms. Cassidy announces that the class will have a poetry slam. Luis not only throws himself into creating a poem, he inspires Sam to do the same. The boys’ sudden, unmitigated enthusiasm for a school project may be hard to swallow, but there is something infectiously hopeful in Luis’ devotion to poetry, as well as in the inspiration Sam takes from old footage of Kurt Cobain. When Luis disappears after a gang fight, Sam, once a loner, teams up with classmates, teachers, neighbors and old friends to find out what has happened. Short, punchy sentences, paragraphs and chapters give the novel’s prose a sense of motion, and Luis’ poems, interspersed with the narrative, give readers added insight into Luis’ character.
Unabashedly didactic, but moving nonetheless. (Fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9514-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Here’s hoping Watson’s teen debut will be followed by many more.
The summer before Maya and Nikki’s senior year of high school brings new challenges as their previously all-black neighborhood becomes attractive to other ethnic groups.
The twins, while still close, have been changing in recent years and now find they have very different views about the changes. Nikki is delighted with improvements in their surroundings, but Maya is concerned they come at too steep a price. When their best friend’s family is displaced, the rift deepens: Maya wants to maintain their connection to Essence, while Nikki has become close to newcomer Kate. Nikki may even be abandoning their long-held plan to attend Spelman College together. Their new principal appears willing to sacrifice many of the traditions the African-American students hold dear. And though Maya and Devin are a long-established couple, Maya finds herself drawn to Kate’s brother, Tony, despite her misgivings about interracial dating. Eventually, the students find a way to reach across the divides and honor the community’s past while embracing its changing present. Maya’s straightforward narration offers an intriguing look at how families and young people cope with community and personal change. Maya and her friends are well-drawn, successful characters surrounded by a realistic adult supporting cast. Readers may be surprised to find this multicultural story set in Portland, Oregon, but that just adds to its distinctive appeal.
Here’s hoping Watson’s teen debut will be followed by many more. (Fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5999-0668-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
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