A teenager’s resistance to change drives this meaty tale from Nolan (Dancing On The Edge, 1997, etc.), about people who are reinventing themselves, or reaffirming who they are. The death of JP’s Grandma Mary not only sends his frail mother to the hospital and his mentally retarded father out into the yard to dig holes with a spoon, it also brings an end to the harmonious, neatly ordered household in which he grew up. Changes are rolling over him like ocean waves as he and his parents move to a big old farmhouse in New Hope, Pennsylvania, along with a gay ex-druggie, a gaggle of budding young poets and musicians, and Bobbi, a teenager fleeing her father’s beatings. Alternating fits of outrage with awkward, sincere efforts to fit in, JP sees his mother take up with a too-friendly doctor and Bobbi with a man ominously like her father, tracks changes in other members of what becomes an extended family, falls in and out of love, and ultimately regains senses of place and self. Nolan makes JP engrossingly complex, prickly but good at heart, confused about his own strong feelings, given to endearingly trite observations (“While everyone around me seemed to have found themselves, I grew more and more lost”), steadfast in his love for his father, and just as steadfast in his love for his mother, although their connection is a stormy one. Most, not all, of the people here make good choices, and Nolan beautifully captures the shifts and textures of human relationships. (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-201915-4
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
Namioka (Den of the White Fox, 1997, etc.) offers readers a glimpse of the ritual of foot-binding, and a surprising heroine whose life is determined by her rejection of that ritual. Ailin is spirited—her family thinks uncontrollable—even at age five, in her family’s compound in China in 1911, she doesn’t want to have her feet bound, especially after Second Sister shows Ailin her own bound feet and tells her how much it hurts. Ailin can see already how bound feet will restrict her movements, and prevent her from running and playing. Her father takes the revolutionary step of permitting her to leave her feet alone, even though the family of Ailin’s betrothed then breaks off the engagement. Ailin goes to the missionary school and learns English; when her father dies and her uncle cuts off funds for tuition, she leaves her family to become a nanny for an American missionary couple’s children. She learns all the daily household chores that were done by servants in her own home, and finds herself, painfully, cut off from her own culture and separate from the Americans. At 16, she decides to go with the missionaries when they return to San Francisco, where she meets and marries another Chinese immigrant who starts his own restaurant. The metaphor of things bound and unbound is a ribbon winding through this vivid narrative; the story moves swiftly, while Ailin is a brave and engaging heroine whose difficult choices reflect her time and her gender. (Fiction. 9-14)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-32666-1
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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