A rewarding, if conservatively paced, coming-of-age tale set on the Texas plains.
A Comanche teenager violates tradition in order to save her mother and her people in this debut YA novel.
West Texas, 1860. The looming Civil War has intensified the bad relations between Native Americans and their Texas neighbors—and revived the tribes’ hopes of driving the whites from the land once and for all. Fifteen-year-old Pohoi, the daughter of a Comanche father and a white mother, is curious about the Spirit Power sacred to her people, the Kwahadi Comanche of the Llano Estacado. Her medicine woman aunt, Hunts Medicine, warns her that Pohoi’s desire—or that of any young woman—to seek the power is taboo. The precocious Pohoi, who is already seeing visions, is prepared to buck tradition. Then tragedy strikes: A group of Texans murders Pohoi’s father and abducts her mother. When the warriors of her tribe appear reluctant to rescue her mother, Pohoi, filled with a desire for vengeance, takes up the task herself. She uses the Comanche Spirit Power to transform into a Ghost Warrior of legend and heads off to rescue her mother from the men who stole her. She is led by the ghost of her father, assisted by her friend—and crush—Yellow Bear, and accompanied by Little Rattler, a Mexican captured in a raid who is the son of her aunt. She will have to move quickly, as her visions seem to predict the destruction not just of her family, but her entire people as well. Chalfant’s detailed prose is well tailored to her protagonist’s rhythms and worldview: “As she ran, she heard chattering voices begin to echo throughout the village. Dogs yapped amid the sudden burst of the warriors’ excited shouts inside the council lodge while Pohoi relished the comforting sound of mothers, no longer fearful of the thunder, cooing to their crying babies.” The tensions between the characters and their relationships to their own roles within Comanche society make for some intriguing drama, though the story takes a while to get going. But the immersive setting and Pohoi’s plucky personality do much to sell the novel, and readers will be more or less content to follow her wherever the Spirit Power leads.
A rewarding, if conservatively paced, coming-of-age tale set on the Texas plains.Pub Date: March 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4759-7337-2
Page Count: 324
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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
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