An affluent Oregon teenager undergoes some value adjustment when he's forced to help a grower with the strawberry harvest in this earnest and engaging debut. After ramming his Bronco into a water pump on a nighttime jaunt across a bean field, Jeff faces a month's labor to work off the debt. It comes at the worst possible time, as far as he's concerned, for he's angling for a sports scholarship for college and there is a major tennis tournament coming up. Initially uncomfortable with the crew of migrant workers, not to mention the farmer's hostile daughter, Alexa, Jeff fits in quickly; he discovers that he cares more and more about both the crop and the people, and is predictably surprised to learn that one of the rewards of hard physical labor is a new edge on the tennis court. With engrossing authority, Olson describes the trials and satisfactions of running a farm, the process of harvesting, and though she sidesteps many of the controversial aspects of using migrant labor, every comment about ``beaners'' or ``wetbacks'' draws an instant and crushing rejoinder from one character or another. A likable cast and several small plot twists buoy up the agenda, and at peak moments the author's competent prose shows glimmers of something finer. Some will want to balance this employer's-eye view of migrant labor with books such as S. Beth Atkin's Voices from the Fields (1993, not reviewed), but Olson knows how to keep readers turning the pages. (Fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-56397-687-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
The best day of Michael Mackenzie's life becomes the worst when the bullet he exuberantly fires into the air during his 17th birthday party comes down a mile away and kills a man. When he hears the story on the radio, the news hits him like a lightning bolt. Numbly following the advice of his best friend, Joe, he buries the rifle and tries, without much success, to get on with life. So does the victim's 15-year-old daughter, Jenna, who had been present when the bullet struck. Switching between Michael's point-of-view and Jenna's, McDonald (Comfort Creek, 1996) sends the two teenagers dancing slowly toward each other, using mutual acquaintances, chance meetings at parties and the community pool, and glimpses at a distance. Both go through parallel phases of denial, both are tortured by remorse, exhibit behavior changes, and experience strange dreams; both eventually find ways to ease their grief and guilt. When the police close in, Joe takes the blame, giving Michael the nerve to confess. In the final chapter, McDonald shifts to present tense and brings Michael and Jenna to a cathartic meeting under a huge sycamore said in local Lenape legend to be a place of healing—an elaborate and, considering the suburban setting and familiar contemporary characters, awkward graft in this deliberately paced but deeply felt drama. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-32309-3
Page Count: 245
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
Curtis debuts with a ten-year-old's lively account of his teenaged brother's ups and downs. Ken tries to make brother Byron out to be a real juvenile delinquent, but he comes across as more of a comic figure: getting stuck to the car when he kisses his image in a frozen side mirror, terrorized by his mother when she catches him playing with matches in the bathroom, earning a shaved head by coming home with a conk. In between, he defends Ken from a bully and buries a bird he kills by accident. Nonetheless, his parents decide that only a long stay with tough Grandma Sands will turn him around, so they all motor from Michigan to Alabama, arriving in time to witness the infamous September bombing of a Sunday school. Ken is funny and intelligent, but he gives readers a clearer sense of Byron's character than his own and seems strangely unaffected by his isolation and harassment (for his odd look—he has a lazy eye—and high reading level) at school. Curtis tries to shoehorn in more characters and subplots than the story will comfortably bear—as do many first novelists—but he creates a well-knit family and a narrator with a distinct, believable voice. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-32175-9
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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