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
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
PROFILES
Don’t let anyone miss this.
Count on award-winning Woodson (Visiting Day, p. 1403, etc.) to present readers with a moving, lyrical, and completely convincing novel in verse.
Eleven-year-old Lonnie (“Locomotion”) starts his poem book for school by getting it all down fast: “This whole book’s a poem ’cause every time I try to / tell the whole story my mind goes Be quiet! / Only it’s not my mind’s voice, / it’s Miss Edna’s over and over and over / Be quiet! . . . So this whole book’s a poem because poetry’s short and / this whole book’s a poem ’cause Ms. Marcus says / write it down before it leaves your brain.” Lonnie tells readers more, little by little, about his foster mother Miss Edna, his teacher Ms. Marcus, his classmates, and the fire that killed his parents and separated him from his sister. Slowly, his gift for observing people and writing it down lets him start to love new people again, and to widen his world from the nugget of tragedy that it was. Woodson nails Lonnie’s voice from the start, and lets him express himself through images and thoughts that vibrate in the different kinds of lines he puts down. He tends to free verse, but is sometimes assigned a certain form by Ms. Marcus. (“Today’s a bad day / Is that haiku? Do I look / like I even care?”) As in her prose novels, Woodson’s created a character whose presence you can feel like they were sitting next to you. And with this first novel-in-verse for her, Lonnie will sit by many readers and teach them to see like he does, “This day is already putting all kinds of words / in your head / and breaking them up into lines / and making the lines into pictures in your mind.”
Don’t let anyone miss this. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-399-23115-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2002
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