A well-crafted YA novel about the various ways one makes it to adulthood.
In Mercer’s YA novel, a teenage girl’s life unfolds in parallel timelines.
Do you ever wonder how your life could have gone if just one thing had been different? In one version of Marin Greene’s life, her parents are divorced. She’s just received a car for her 17th birthday (from her dad, of course), and she’s planning to use it to spend as much time away from her overbearing mother as possible. Her best friend has been Hannah since the two of them stopped hanging out with their third musketeer, Whitney, as soon as the three got to high school. Marin’s biggest problem—other than deciding where to go to college—is that she and Hannah both have crushes on the same guy: a truck-driving, soccer-playing fellow named Sam Hanson. In another version of Marin’s life, her parents never divorced, though she still battles with her overbearing mother on a near daily basis. This Marin spends most of her time smoking cigarettes in the park with her boy-crazy best friend, Whitney, and working at a grocery store with Sam Hanson. Sam clearly likes Marin, though he’s also the No. 1 desire of her ex-friend, golden girl Hannah. Is it possible that the two different versions of Marin’s life could end up in the same place? The two timelines are demarcated through the use of different fonts, and the author does an impressive job crafting two distinct Marins—one bolder, one more timid—who nevertheless feel like the same person. The prose is always alive, as when Marin (who loves to dance in both timelines) shows Sam her moves: “I sank into the motions immediately. Lifting up, folding over, then up again. Swinging an arm out to the side, and most of my body with it, then the other. Spin, collapse, rolling up off my toes, reaching and reaching and folding and hurting—the song was about being trapped, trying to get out, get free….” The story compellingly demonstrates how human relationships are always multifaceted, no matter how history shakes out.
A well-crafted YA novel about the various ways one makes it to adulthood.Pub Date: May 16, 2023
ISBN: 9798987256725
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Bare Ink
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away.
A Mexican American boy takes on heavy responsibilities when his family is torn apart.
Mateo’s life is turned upside down the day U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents show up unsuccessfully seeking his Pa at his New York City bodega. The Garcias live in fear until the day both parents are picked up; his Pa is taken to jail and his Ma to a detention center. The adults around Mateo offer support to him and his 7-year-old sister, Sophie, however, he knows he is now responsible for caring for her and the bodega as well as trying to survive junior year—that is, if he wants to fulfill his dream to enter the drama program at the Tisch School of the Arts and become an actor. Mateo’s relationships with his friends Kimmie and Adam (a potential love interest) also suffer repercussions as he keeps his situation a secret. Kimmie is half Korean (her other half is unspecified) and Adam is Italian American; Mateo feels disconnected from them, less American, and with worries they can’t understand. He talks himself out of choosing a safer course of action, a decision that deepens the story. Mateo’s self-awareness and inner monologue at times make him seem older than 16, and, with significant turmoil in the main plot, some side elements feel underdeveloped. Aleman’s narrative joins the ranks of heart-wrenching stories of migrant families who have been separated.
An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5605-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting, brutal and beautifully told.
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 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
PROFILES
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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