Senior year changes everything.
Ever since discovering that her always-absent father actually raped her mother, and her subsequent birth destroyed her mother's hopes of a college degree, Annabeth has felt like a monster. Fortunately, throughout high school, she's held the position of Noe's best friend. They plan matching tattoos and matching futures. Noe also anchors her new boyfriend, Steven, an elegant and quirky actor with a suicidal past. Annabeth and Steven strike a limited but playful friendship, and all goes well until Noe begins to change. A remarkably casual sexual encounter leads to an abortion for Annabeth while visiting her cousin in college. Afterward, while her relationship with her mother continues to be strained ("[we] loved each other with eyes averted, like birds circling a pile of grain but never coming close enough to peck"), Annabeth reluctantly begins to drop agreed-upon pretenses in favor of the truth. Admitting to Noe's costs Annabeth their friendship; admitting to her own is harder. Steven teeters dangerously on the edge of a different truth. Some of the issues, particularly regarding Annabeth's father, feel forced, but the mess and loose ends of this story reflect human reality. Annabeth emerges as a complicated character doing her best. Smith's prose is knock-down gorgeous.
A fearless writer ably tackles a difficult story. (Fiction. 14 & up)Pub Date: May 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-218471-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES
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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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PROFILES
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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