A wastrel-in-training finds cause, and a Cause, to mend his ways in this alternate history from the author of Shakespeare’s Scribe (2000). The American revolt has collapsed with the capture of George Washington, but there’s still unrest in the colonies. Creighton Brown, spoiled son of a British officer supposedly killed in the war, has been involuntarily dispatched there in hopes that his ruthless uncle, Hugh Gower, colonel in charge of the Charles Town garrison, can shape him up. Captured by pirates led by dashing hothead Benedict Arnold, Creighton meets Ben Franklin and other exiles living in Spanish-held New Orleans, and finds himself playing both sides, forced to spy for Gower while becoming embroiled in a rebel plan to find and free Washington. Losing his arrogance and preconceptions with realistic reluctance, Creighton survives several narrow scrapes on the way to rescuing his father, who turns out to have actually been imprisoned for warning settlers of an impending massacre. As well, he ends up taking to heart Franklin’s observation that there is no such thing as a good war, or a bad peace. Disappointingly, Washington never does turn up, but readers will be swept along by this what if? adventure, and will find Franklin’s philosophy as applicable today as ever. (afterword) (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-525-46921-4
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
Long after the destruction of society, a tribe of Amazons lives an ascetic life. Along with the other young women of her community, Keller longs to become a Tracker, guarding the borders from mutant, deviant men. She doesn’t want to be dragged into political machinations: not those of her secret-keeping teachers; nor those of the ruling Committee who decide when the girls will be impregnated; nor those of the other Novice Trackers’ prohibited cliques. The most popular of the Novices, Laing, has discovered a cache of secrets and is reveling in its forbidden discoveries: press-on fingernails, names that end in i and y, makeup, social manipulation. Meanwhile, the all-powerful Committee Chair publicly flaunts a different taboo femininity, riding sidesaddle in Victorian garb. Oddly, the girls relate exclusively to glamorous 20th-/21st-century Western models, although the limited sources available to them also portray young girls, athletes and women in niqab. Nevertheless, secrets revealed make for a compelling emotional journey for Keller in this possible series opener, despite the incongruous obsession with 21st-century mores. (Dystopian science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9064-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
Patneaude (The Last Man’s Reward, 1996, etc.) hatches a silly plot and one-dimensional characters, but preteens might enjoy this piece of escapist entertainment about a boy wrongly committed to a mental asylum. Peter’s weak-willed mother has lied to him all his life about his real father, allegedly dead. Peter doesn’t get along with his stepfather, a car salesman, who schemes to have him committed by a corrupt psychiatrist. In the asylum, Peter befriends two disturbed inmates and a health technician who help him escape. Among the absurd plot concoctions: Peter’s five-year-old half-brother, Lincoln, is psychic, allowing Peter extraordinary access to clues he needs to find his real father; and that his father has been searching for Peter all along. Patneaude resurrects elements from his first novel, Someone Was Watching (1993), in which a supposedly drowned sister has really been kidnapped, and in which a cross-country trip unfolds without much mishap. His writing style, however, is so robust that even if readers find little remotely connected to reality in these pages, there’s more than enough suspense in the fast-paced narrative to keep them entertained. (Fiction. 8-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8075-9098-3
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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