Nine fairytales are given shimmering and scary shape in very modern dress, with Block’s luminescent, darkling prose. The one-word titles evoke but do not prescribe. In “Snow,” a screaming child who quiets in the arms of the gardener is given over by him to a houseful of self-described freaks—seven men with the names of animals, who are not-quite-fathers to her. It is the gardener who awakens Snow from her poisoned sleep, but she rejects him to choose the life she knows with the seven. “Wolf” reconfigures the Red Riding Hood story in a harrowing tale of incest and sorrow; “Rose” is a powerful metaphor of the bond between sisters, Rose White and Rose Red, and how emergent eroticism looses that tie. “Bones” recasts Bluebeard as a sinister L.A. promoter. The place of California dreams, desert light, and movieland glitz familiar in other Block books is her fairy landscape, repopulated with girls who have rose tattoos and remember River Phoenix. She uses language like a jeweled sword, glittering as it cuts to the heart. Readers who thrilled to Donohue’s Kissing the Witch (1997) and Donna Jo Napoli’s Zel (1996) will find similar dark magic here. (Fiction. YA)
Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-028129-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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