A 15-year-old boy with OCD struggles for mental health. Obsessed with cleanliness, germs, order, and the number four, Devon Brown feels compelled to wash his hands frequently, line up his books perfectly, and eat four of everything. Hoping to give Devon a fresh start (again), his concerned parents move, hire a new therapist, and enroll Devon in private school. The story, which never develops the dramatic urgency of Harrar’s Parents Wanted, gathers steam when one of Devon’s new acquaintances talks him into going to the school after-hours, then defaces the property with spray paint. Devon, who accompanied the boy because he felt the need to straighten a crooked poster in the biology room, is seen at the school, accused of the crime, and suspended. The reader is supposed to see a connection between Devon’s obsessions and the trouble he gets into, but the correlation is weak, and despite the intriguing topic, the protagonist never becomes more than a sum of his neuroses. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 24, 2003
ISBN: 0-618-26365-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
The exodus of the Jews is breaking Dani’s heart: the exodus from Buenos Aires, that is. The 2001 Argentinian currency crisis has destroyed Buenos Aires’s economy, and all of Dani’s friends are moving to Israel or the United States. Dani’s own family, devastated by poverty and her father’s overwhelming depression, is headed to New York. There, in a wealthy suburb, Dani struggles to make friends in a huge, English-speaking public high school. Dani’s high-school problems follow a checklist of issues: autistic friend, mean popular girl, long-distance boyfriend hiding his new romance. The supporting characters act mostly as set dressing—from the bully who vanishes as soon as he has provoked another character’s redemption to the friend from ESL class who has no nationality or history of her own—and the comforting solutions are too pat. Enjoyable enough, so keep this on the shelf to fight misconceptions about terrorism, poverty, immigration and Jews—but don’t expect readers to come begging for more. (Historical fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-15144-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
PLB 0-7868-2427-1 The content and concerns of Levy’s latest is at odds with the young reading level and large type size, which may prevent this novel’s natural audience of middle schoolers from finding a fast and funny read. In sixth grade, Rebecca broke her friend Scott’s toe at a dance. Now, in seventh grade, they are partners in a ballroom dance class, and they soon find they dance well together, but that makes Rebecca’s friend Samantha jealous. She gives a party during which spin-the-bottle is played, kissing Scott and then bullying him into being her boyfriend. While Rebecca deals with her mixed feelings about all this, she also has a crush on her dance instructor. Levy (My Life as a Fifth-Grade Comedian, 1997, etc.) has great comedic timing and writes with a depth of feeling to make early adolescent romantic travails engaging; she also comes through on the equally difficult feat of making ballroom dancing appealing to young teens. The obsession with kissing, pre-sexual tension, and sensuality of the dancing will be off-putting or engrossing, depending entirely on readers’ comfort levels with such conversations in real life as well as on the page. Precocious preteens will find that this humorously empathetic take on budding romance is just right. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-7868-0498-X
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
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