A deeply perceptive sports tale for young readers.
An underground drug operation affects the young baseball players of Williams County, Virginia, in Saur’s (Soccer Star, 2017, etc.) middle grade sports suspense novel.
Thirteen-year-old African-American Devon Horner’s best friend, Corey Strider, was arrested last summer after associating with drug dealer Preston Whiteside. Since then, Devon has resolved to stay far away from criminal activity in his economically depressed neighborhood. This has been a challenge, however, as Preston keeps pressuring him to join his crew. Later, after accusing Preston of giving up Corey to the cops, the drug dealer’s thugs chase Devon across town. Devon eventually ends up at a baseball game at a more affluent, predominantly white middle school. As a casual player, Devon quickly becomes fascinated with the team and strikes up a friendship with one of the players, a white boy named Henry Lee. As summer begins, Henry and his friend Kevin decide to join the Little League tournament at Devon’s church. However, the differences in the players’ backgrounds initially seem to be insurmountable; in order to come together as a team, the boys must embrace their commonalities. Meanwhile, two other students at Henry’s middle school newspaper investigate rumors that the school’s baseball team is involved in drug activity, and they start looking into the background of its mysterious coach, Dillon Wood. Ultimately, the various threads of the plot weave together in a page-turning climax. As might be expected, baseball games comprise a major part of this story. The detailed descriptions of various plays will obviously appeal most to sports enthusiasts, but Saur makes sure to keep them accessible to nonfans. More significantly, the author provides an insightful analysis of relationships between young people of different races and economic backgrounds. The characters are realistically portrayed as having complicated emotions, resulting in touching moments; a particularly poignant example is Devon’s secret feeling that Henry will abandon their friendship as soon as it becomes inconvenient. Overall, Saur skillfully handles the delicate subject matter and infuses the story with optimism.
A deeply perceptive sports tale for young readers.Pub Date: May 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-692-80648-7
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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