A well-told, unsparing, and increasingly disturbing journey through unmoored adolescence.
A coming-of-age debut novel unspools through the correspondence between a young teenager and his older sister, who is in a juvenile detention program.
In this compelling and unsettling YA tale, 17-year-old Kelly Cantz has been sent to a school for troubled girls in the Idaho mountains, leaving her 13-year-old brother, Sammy, back in Missouri. He is left to cope alone with his parents’ crumbling marriage and their obsessive worry that he’ll follow in his sister’s footsteps and use drugs. In letters that take place over nearly a year, the siblings tell each other what is happening in their lives. Sammy writes about the minefield of early adolescence, dysfunctional adults (including one twisted teacher), bullying and sexually predatory older teens, and the outlets he finds in dark poetry and his growing prowess in football. Rebellious Kelly’s reports on her school experiences in the mountains are scathing, but her concern for her brother is evident, as is her alarm when his peripheral involvement with her unsavory former high school friends becomes something more. Although the flawed adults are observed only through the siblings’ eyes, the parents have between-the-lines dimension. While believably self-absorbed in their marital conflict, they offer moments of parental connection (between Dad’s absenteeism and Mom’s suffocating anxiety). But they are oblivious to what Kelly knows is the real danger: Sammy’s attraction to one of the older girls, leading to a series of shocking incidents—involving a secret cave, self-mutilation, and teen pornography—that will change both siblings’ lives. That these events don’t feel gratuitous is due to Eliot’s skill in building up to them and to the achingly realistic voices revealed through Kelly’s and Sammy’s letters, reflecting the teens’ angst, anger, betrayals, triumphs, new insights, and the subtle changes that take place with the passage of time and their life experiences. It is that authenticity that makes it gut-wrenching when the author has Sammy discover the extent of Kelly’s transgressions and seemingly lose the only person he can trust.
A well-told, unsparing, and increasingly disturbing journey through unmoored adolescence.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-9846156-9-8
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Cur Dog Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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