In the end, readers will be left scratching their heads wondering what actually happened and, worse, whether they even care....
If this novel were a holiday, it would undoubtedly be New Year’s Eve—full of the promise of fun and romance, but a whopping disappointment in the end.
The first book of a planned trilogy begins with 17-year-old Nikki Youngblood running for her life, a pack of hellhounds gnashing at her heels. Luckily, three half-human, half-angel hunks are looking on and rush to her rescue. Though it is unclear why Nikki is the target of such nefarious forces (an issue that is never satisfactorily resolved), the Halflings assume responsibility for her protection and attempt to uncover the truth about dark and mysterious happenings in her Missouri town. Unfortunately, the balance between questions raised and answers given is maddeningly uneven. The narrative is riddled with clichés and clunky descriptions (hair “dancing in waves as if orchestrating a dance,” for example) that weigh the storytelling down. Even a good, old-fashioned love triangle can’t save the story from itself. Bad boy Raven’s lust for Nikki is at least in character, but it is nearly impossible to comprehend how the virtuous Mace could fall so hard, so fast and with so little explanation, especially when it could damn him.
In the end, readers will be left scratching their heads wondering what actually happened and, worse, whether they even care. (Paranormal romance. 13 & up)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0310728184
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Zondervan
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
A well-crafted plot with interesting revelations about living as a second-generation Muslim-American teen in today’s climate.
High school senior Maya Aziz works up the courage to tell her parents that she’s gotten into the film school of her dreams in New York City, but their expectations combined with anti-Muslim backlash from a terror attack threaten to derail her dream.
Maya, the only brown girl in her school with the only immigrant parents, loves parts of her Indian culture but blames everything she thinks she can’t have on her cultural constraints and on the fact that she’s different. Time is running out to break the news to her parents that her filmmaking is more than just a hobby. Meanwhile, two potential love interests command her attention. Her matchmaking parents like Kareem, an intriguing young Indian man Maya meets and dates, while Phil, a white classmate who’s been her longtime crush, remains a secret from her parents. Interspersed with Maya’s intimate first-person account are brief, cinematic interludes tracking a disturbed young man who commits a terror attack. First reports blame someone who shares Maya’s last name, and the backlash they suffer leads her parents to restrict Maya’s options. Maya is not especially religious, but she is forced to grapple with her Muslim identity as bullying takes a dangerous turn. Her feelings of entrapment within her parents’ dreams are laid on thick, and Maya herself notes a clichéd moment or two in her story, but the core relationships are authentic and memorable, and the conclusion is satisfying.
A well-crafted plot with interesting revelations about living as a second-generation Muslim-American teen in today’s climate. (Fiction. 13-18)Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61695-847-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Soho Teen
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Evil that is impossibly difficult to comprehend and filled with word-images that will leave readers gasping. The author’s...
Gerta didn’t know she was Jewish until she and her father were taken for transport by the Nazis.
When Bergen-Belsen is liberated, Gerta and the other survivors are ill, skeletal, dying, or sunk in madness, and they have no homes to which they can return. Relating the events that led her there, she tells of a seemingly carefree life in Würzburg with her musician father and German gentile stepmother, an opera singer who is also Gerta’s voice teacher. But they were living with false identification papers, and their lives become ever more withdrawn. She has fleeting visions of her early childhood in Köln, of her mother, and of Kristallnacht. The cattle-car journey to Theresienstadt is only the beginning of days, weeks, months, years filled with unspeakable horrors in the “intricacies of the Nazi web…the animalization of human souls.” Then comes Auschwitz, where her father is gassed, then Bergen-Belsen, typhus, and, finally, a kind of awakening to her own humanity. Later she covertly enters British-occupied Palestine, Eratz Yisrael, and builds a life there. Stamper spares readers nothing. Everything that Gerta witnesses or experiences really happened in the hell that was the Holocaust, including the further humiliations in its aftermath, a rarely told part of the story. The text is on pale, sepia-toned paper with dark, eerie illustrations in the same tones, reminiscent of real drawings produced by camp inmates.
Evil that is impossibly difficult to comprehend and filled with word-images that will leave readers gasping. The author’s dedication says it all, in both Hebrew and English: “Remember.” (author’s note, map, glossary, resources, acknowledgments; not seen) (Historical fiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-0038-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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