Traumatized Alice and Manny find love and healing with each other.
Alice Nightingale, age 15, was sexually assaulted at 12, a story which emerges in pieces over the course of the book. Due to resultant brain injury, Alice is stuck in “twelveness” though she questions the doctors’ prognosis. Alice’s thoughts are presented without capitalization and often as beautiful, fragmented poetry, giving her character a unique voice. The Nightingales are poor, but Alice is content with her faithful dog, caring for her ailing grandmother, and spending time with her loving brother, Joey. Endearing, sweet 16-year-old Manny James, the book’s second voice, is a black immigrant from Sierra Leone who sees Alice (“her hair was red as fire and her skin was pale as bone”) while running one night. Thus begins a disappointing pattern of fetishizing Alice’s long hair and paleness. As a former child soldier, Manny has suffered trauma too painful to recall, just like Alice, and though they find solace and healing in each other, it seems unlikely that traumatized Alice could “shed [her] twelveness like a skin” by having sex. It’s a shame that such lush writing and solid character development in a book that explores important themes like trauma, healing, bullying, and classism is marred by a tired trope and a random, rather unbelievable ending that includes Alice’s seemingly sudden cure.
A flawed but beautiful and tragic story of hope. (Fiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: May 8, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7636-9272-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: April 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
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Riveting, brutal and beautifully told.
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A devastating tale of greed and secrets springs from the summer that tore Cady’s life apart.
Cady Sinclair’s family uses its inherited wealth to ensure that each successive generation is blond, beautiful and powerful. Reunited each summer by the family patriarch on his private island, his three adult daughters and various grandchildren lead charmed, fairy-tale lives (an idea reinforced by the periodic inclusions of Cady’s reworkings of fairy tales to tell the Sinclair family story). But this is no sanitized, modern Disney fairy tale; this is Cinderella with her stepsisters’ slashed heels in bloody glass slippers. Cady’s fairy-tale retellings are dark, as is the personal tragedy that has led to her examination of the skeletons in the Sinclair castle’s closets; its rent turns out to be extracted in personal sacrifices. Brilliantly, Lockhart resists simply crucifying the Sinclairs, which might make the family’s foreshadowed tragedy predictable or even satisfying. Instead, she humanizes them (and their painful contradictions) by including nostalgic images that showcase the love shared among Cady, her two cousins closest in age, and Gat, the Heathcliff-esque figure she has always loved. Though increasingly disenchanted with the Sinclair legacy of self-absorption, the four believe family redemption is possible—if they have the courage to act. Their sincere hopes and foolish naïveté make the teens’ desperate, grand gesture all that much more tragic.
Riveting, brutal and beautifully told. (Fiction. 14 & up)Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-74126-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FAMILY | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES
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This story is necessary. This story is important.
23
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Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter is a black girl and an expert at navigating the two worlds she exists in: one at Garden Heights, her black neighborhood, and the other at Williamson Prep, her suburban, mostly white high school.
Walking the line between the two becomes immensely harder when Starr is present at the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend, Khalil, by a white police officer. Khalil was unarmed. Khalil’s death becomes national news, where he’s called a thug and possible drug dealer and gangbanger. His death becomes justified in the eyes of many, including one of Starr’s best friends at school. The police’s lackadaisical attitude sparks anger and then protests in the community, turning it into a war zone. Questions remain about what happened in the moments leading to Khalil’s death, and the only witness is Starr, who must now decide what to say or do, if anything. Thomas cuts to the heart of the matter for Starr and for so many like her, laying bare the systemic racism that undergirds her world, and she does so honestly and inescapably, balancing heartbreak and humor. With smooth but powerful prose delivered in Starr’s natural, emphatic voice, finely nuanced characters, and intricate and realistic relationship dynamics, this novel will have readers rooting for Starr and opening their hearts to her friends and family.
This story is necessary. This story is important. (Fiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-249853-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2016
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES
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