A quirky nocturnal visitor offers a confused 16-year-old the superpower of his choice.
Everything is suddenly different for Skipper, a New York City teenager; less than a week after his mother’s death from cancer, he wakes up in a hospital bed after suffering what his doctor calls a “life threatening” asthma attack and finds that someone is in the room with him—a strange man wearing a sombrero, a horizontally striped suit and mismatched socks. The odd stranger introduces himself as Hal and offers Skipper any superpower he would like, under the assumption that he will use it to make the world a better place. Unsure which power to choose, Skipper agrees to think about it and drifts off to sleep, bringing the surreal conversation to an end. The next day, Skipper isn’t sure whether the encounter had actually taken place, or whether it was brought on by the strong asthma medication his overprotective mother had always been wary of his using. But when Hal continues to visit Skipper at night, the teenager mulls over his superpower options in earnest. Meanwhile, Skipper, along with his best friends Albert and John, must negotiate all the social and physical hazards that come with being the relatively uncool kids at their exclusive private school, while Skipper deals with a crabby, emotionally distant father, an eager love interest and, most importantly of all, the freedom and responsibility that comes with life without his overprotective mother. This book presents a humorous yet poignant account of a young man’s first brush with adulthood, featuring well-rendered, believable characters. The prickly relationship between Skipper and his father is especially well done, and the scenes between Skipper and Hal utilize peculiar dream logic to good effect. There are moments that are slightly out of place—an encounter with a bully at a dance, for instance—but overall the plot flows nicely. The book’s simple prose and lighthearted tone make it a pleasure to read, and, combined with its universal themes, suitable for young readers and adults alike. The fact that the humor tends toward the goofy only adds to this book’s considerable charm. A touching, funny novel perfectly suited for anyone who is or ever has been a teenager.
Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461170167
Page Count: 249
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© 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.
