An unsuccessful attempt to inspire girls to rebel against conformity.
Determined to prove that girls can play the drums, Tig forms an all-girl rock band.
When a male classmate declares that a girl drummer doesn’t have the ability to lead a band, 13-year-old Antigone, or Tig, begins taking drum lessons. In her quest to disprove her classmate, Tig, a white girl with frizzy, brown hair, searches for the perfect band mates. After disastrous open auditions, she and her cousin privately recruit additional band members, including popular white girl Haley as their lead singer. Predictably, Haley does not take direction well and is asked to leave the band. In retribution for this slight, Haley and her girlfriends try to lure Tig’s new lead singer away from her band. The popular girls sabotage the band’s failed debut performance and upload the fiasco online. Mortified, Tig must re-evaluate her motives for learning the drums and try to keep her band from falling apart. Rue effortlessly captures Tig’s passion for her drums, but her other characters seem to exist only to propel Tig’s internal transformation. Some character portrayals are culturally insensitive, including a redheaded fair-skinned girl who raps and speaks in African-American street slang. Chinese-American Robbie, the only significant character of color (troubling itself in this Tuscaloosa-set novel), is called a racial slur to illustrate bullying, but there is no further acknowledgement or discussion of the slur outside the occurrence.
An unsuccessful attempt to inspire girls to rebel against conformity. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-58536-945-4
Page Count: 360
Publisher: Sleeping Bear Press
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2016
Charming, poignant, and thoughtfully woven.
An aspiring scientist and a budding artist become friends and help each other with dream projects.
Unfolding in mid-1980s Sacramento, California, this story stars 12-year-olds Rosalind and Benjamin as first-person narrators in alternating chapters. Ro’s father, a fellow space buff, was killed by a drunk driver; the rocket they were working on together lies unfinished in her closet. As for Benji, not only has his best friend, Amir, moved away, but the comic book holding the clue for locating his dad is also missing. Along with their profound personal losses, the protagonists share a fixation with the universe’s intriguing potential: Ro decides to complete the rocket and hopes to launch mementos of her father into outer space while Benji’s conviction that aliens and UFOs are real compels his imagination and creativity as an artist. An accident in science class triggers a chain of events forcing Benji and Ro, who is new to the school, to interact and unintentionally learn each other’s secrets. They resolve to find Benji’s dad—a famous comic-book artist—and partner to finish Ro’s rocket for the science fair. Together, they overcome technical, scheduling, and geographical challenges. Readers will be drawn in by amusing and fantastical elements in the comic book theme, high emotional stakes that arouse sympathy, and well-drawn character development as the protagonists navigate life lessons around grief, patience, self-advocacy, and standing up for others. Ro is biracial (Chinese/White); Benji is White.
Charming, poignant, and thoughtfully woven. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-300888-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit...
The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction (Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction—a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.
Five years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her; the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter; later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here; like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events—but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 1, 1989
ISBN: 0547577095
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
© Copyright 2023 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
