Smart and fitfully chilling, but puerile St. Ebury school sometimes seems less like a setting than a wallow.
Part mystery, part exploration of adolescent psychology, McAdam’s second novel (Some Great Thing, 2004) revolves around the disappearance of a teenaged girl from an elite Canadian boarding school.
Handsome, easygoing, effortlessly self-assured Julius is the charmed son of an American diplomat. His romance with the beautiful Fallon (Fall for short) provokes the envy of classmates, especially awkward, cerebral Noel, his senior-year roommate. Thrown together by circumstance, the boys develop an ad hoc friendship, and Noel becomes a confidant for the besotted Julius. When Julius, confined after a prank, enlists his roommate as a romantic go-between, Noel’s fascination with the golden couple metastasizes into obsession. Then, just before winter vacation, Fall goes missing. It takes a while for her disappearance to make ripples beyond the cloistered world of the St. Ebury School, but eventually the police are summoned and suspicion falls on the roommates. In the novel’s second half we see both boys’ self-mythologies implode. The story is told mainly in their voices: Noel’s chilly, careful narrative contrasts with his roommate’s bubbly, almost aggressively superficial stream of consciousness. Noel’s sections have flashes of William Trevor–like darkness and insight, and the plot does eventually build momentum, but the police investigation of Fall’s disappearance is oddly halfhearted and low-key, a circumstance that serves the plot more than the mandates of law enforcement.
Smart and fitfully chilling, but puerile St. Ebury school sometimes seems less like a setting than a wallow.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59643-220-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Affecting and hopeful.
A stray dog finds her destiny amid the chaos of a Southern California wildfire.
Wombat is a small dog with stubby legs and “silly ears / that look like furry cookies”—almost impossibly cute in Bricking’s occasional pencil-style vignettes. She’s mastered the art of survival, so when a mysterious internal voice prods her to go toward the fire, she resists. “The wrong way is the right way. / The right way is the wrong way,” the voice insists. When she tells fellow stray Silas about it, he tells Wombat she’s a “destiny dog,” bound to “find their person / before their person / can find them.” Convinced, she decides to follow the mysterious instructions. Meanwhile, Henry, a boy who’s leery of dogs, loves the bats at the wildlife rehabilitation center where Mama Ro, a veterinarian, works; his Mama J is a librarian. Henry and Barnabas, a fruit bat at the center, are both uprooted by the fire, and their paths converge with Wombat’s at an emergency shelter. The third-person perspective shifts from character to character in clusters of free-verse poems that fully immerse readers in each one’s experiences in turn. This extra-concentrated delivery of Applegate’s typically spare writing proves effective, balancing terror and sadness with heart and humor. Henry has light brown skin, Mama Ro has curly black hair and brown skin, and Mama J presents white.
Affecting and hopeful. (Verse fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 5, 2026
ISBN: 9780063221178
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Storytide/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 9, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2026
A beautiful, powerful reflection on a tragic history.
In spare verse, Lowry reflects on moments in her childhood, including the bombings of Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima.
When she was a child, Lowry played at Waikiki Beach with her grandmother while her father filmed. In the old home movie, the USS Arizona appears through the mist on the horizon. Looking back at her childhood in Hawaii and then Japan, Lowry reflects on the bombings that began and ended a war and how they affected and connected everyone involved. In Part 1, she shares the lives and actions of sailors at Pearl Harbor. Part 2 is stories of civilians in Hiroshima affected by the bombing. Part 3 presents her own experience as an American in Japan shortly after the war ended. The poems bring the haunting human scale of war to the forefront, like the Christmas cards a sailor sent days before he died or the 4-year-old who was buried with his red tricycle after Hiroshima. All the personal stories—of sailors, civilians, and Lowry herself—are grounding. There is heartbreak and hope, reminding readers to reflect on the past to create a more peaceful future. Lowry uses a variety of poetry styles, identifying some, such as triolet and haiku. Pak’s graphite illustrations are like still shots of history, adding to the emotion and somber feeling. He includes some sailors of color among the mostly white U.S. forces; Lowry is white.
A beautiful, powerful reflection on a tragic history. (author’s note, bibliography) (Memoir/poetry. 10-14)Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-12940-0
Page Count: 80
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
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