A winning, offbeat romp for all ages.
The lives of four young people intersect in unexpected ways as the result of a spectacular art heist in Melbourne.
In August 1986, a valuable Picasso painting is stolen off the walls of the National Gallery of Victoria and held for ransom. In alternating third-person chapters, readers learn that Luke, the talented young Artist with his star on the rise, is involved in a plot to steal the painting and return a forgery in its place. He also happens to be the Bastard Ex of Penny, a white 23-year-old trying to raise their baby, Joshie, on her own. Penny lives next door to Rafi, the Girl, a 17-year-old dealing with the eccentricities of her grieving mother, who never got over the drowning death of Rafi's younger brother in their home country of Bolivia. And who is the Guy (his name as well as his role)? Guy is a white high school senior who unwittingly throws the biggest party of the year, which sets into motion a series of events that gets him mixed up with the lives of the Girl, the Artist, and the Ex. This fully realized cast of characters is rounded out by a supporting cast of sympathetic friends and family, all flawed in their own ways. Williams’ prose is wise, knowing, and sympathetic, her tag-team story moving along at a steady clip toward a heart-thumping climax and a satisfying denouement.
A winning, offbeat romp for all ages. (Fiction. 15 & up)Pub Date: March 14, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-55498-941-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Groundwood
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
Teen and adult readers who like their mysteries gritty and literary, with a touch of magic: seek this one out.
A fiercely realized teen uses astrological skills to solve a heartbreaking mystery.
Joanne Crowe, an astrologer so accurate and empathetic that clients became obsessed with her, knew her days were numbered. She’d always insisted on the truth of her impending “eventuality” to her daughter, Avicenna, but when Joanne goes missing, it’s still a shock. As Avicenna embraces her own ability to read destinies in the stars and planets to unravel the mystery of her beloved mother’s disappearance, her skills introduce her to both unlikely allies and revolting, violent foes across Melbourne’s most luxurious and down-at-the-heels neighborhoods. Avicenna is a revelation: prickly and brilliant—she’s the first student in years to ace the entrance exam at a highly competitive magnet high school—she pursues the truth doggedly even as the likelihood of her mother’s death forces her to re-experience the physical and emotional trauma of the fire that took her father’s life 10 years prior. Lim throws class differences into high relief and highlights the casual, cruel racism multiracial people still face in modern Australia. Her taut, assured thriller weaves together astrology and mythology, poetry and poverty, and several generations of mothers whose love can’t protect their children from humanity’s ugliest tendencies.
Teen and adult readers who like their mysteries gritty and literary, with a touch of magic: seek this one out. (Mystery. 15 & up)Pub Date: June 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-922182-00-5
Page Count: 330
Publisher: Text
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
In spite of its narrative unevenness, this novel of friendship, love, and fighting for one's beliefs should find a place...
When war broke out a year ago in the fairy city of Ferrum, its inhabitants, except for four young rebellious fairies, fled in search of a safer home.
Now, a cease-fire has been declared, but tensions still run high among the combatants: the fairies; the gnomes, who work for the fairies in exchange for edible fairy body parts; and the invading tightropers, a species that swings about the city via ropes they spin in their mouths. In order to maintain peace in Ferrum, teen fairy Beckan Moloy and her remaining fairy friends form an unlikely alliance with gnomes and a tightroper. With Ferrum, Moskowitz has built a vividly gritty fairy realm and populated it with a richly diverse cast of characters, but the narrative can be confusing. Third-person past-tense narration alternates with third-person present, and it is peppered with remarks from an intrusive narrator. Only about two-thirds of the way into the novel do readers find out that the story is one fairy’s chronicle of the war through Beckan’s eyes, interspersed with asides. Though initially disconcerting, these trenchant asides are often quite endearing: “Shit, what the fuck am I even doing? What kind of history book doesn’t have a map?” the narrator laments early on.
In spite of its narrative unevenness, this novel of friendship, love, and fighting for one's beliefs should find a place among fans of the modern fairy story. (Fantasy. 15-18)Pub Date: July 28, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4521-2942-6
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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