British twins Rich and Jade Chance have come to accept that their father works for British Intelligence, but they’re not about to let him have all the adventures in the family. On their way to a vacation in Venice, John Chance completes a seemingly simple mission for his superiors by helping an accountant to super-crooks disappear into a new life. No mission is that easy, though. The accountant, code-named “The Banker,” turns up at the twins’ private school back in England, and in short order the school is taken over by The Banker’s former main client. Rich is kidnapped, and there seems to be a mole in John’s department. Rich and Jade use their wits to solve the case and do away with the bad guys. This second entry in Higgins and Richards’s British spy-teens series is just as much fun as the first (Sure Fire, 2007). These kids get by on ingenuity rather than with gadgets. There’s no deep character development, and some moments stretch believability, but fans of the series or the genre will be satisfied and ask for more. (Thriller. 10-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-399-25081-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2008
This is a minor quibble with a story that imagines so clearly for American readers the travails of all-too-many Latin...
A 12-year-old girl bears witness to the Dominican Revolution of 1961 in a powerful first-person narrative.
The story opens as Anita’s cousins (the Garcia girls of Alvarez’s 1991 adult debut, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents), hurriedly pack to leave the country. This signals the end of childhood innocence for Anita. In short succession, her family finds the secret police parked in their driveway; the American consul moves in next door; and her older sister Lucinda is packed off to join her cousins in New York after she attracts the unwelcome attention of El Jefe Trujillo, the country’s dictator. Anita’s family, it seems, is intimately involved with the political resistance to Trujillo, and she, perforce, is drawn into the emotional maelstrom. The present-tense narrative lends the story a gripping immediacy, as Anita moves from the healthy, self-absorbed naïveté of early adolescence to a prematurely aged understanding of the world’s brutality. Her entree into puberty goes hand in hand with her entree into this adult world of terror: “I don’t want to be a señorita now that I know what El Jefe does to señoritas.” According to an author’s note, Alvarez (How Tía Lola Came to Visit Stay, 2001, etc.) drew upon the experiences of family members who stayed behind in the Dominican Republic during this period of political upheaval, crafting a story that, in its matter-of-fact detailing of the increasingly surreal world surrounding Anita, feels almost realer than life. The power of the narrative is weakened somewhat by the insertion of Anita’s diary entries as she and her mother take shelter in the Italian Embassy after her father’s arrest. The first-person, present-tense construction of the diary entries are not different enough from the main narrative to make them come alive as such; instead, the artifice draws attention to itself, creating a distraction.
This is a minor quibble with a story that imagines so clearly for American readers the travails of all-too-many Latin nations then and now. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-81544-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
The timeline overlaps the events of the companion novel, but fans of the first won’t feel déjà vu. There’s more of a sense...
One quarter of the “Gang of Five” from The Misfits (2001) tells his own story of coming out and overcoming bullies and prejudice through alphabetical entries in his “alphabiography.”
Joe Bunch aka JoDan aka Scorpio (among other names) works his way from October to March to fulfill his teacher Mr. Daly’s assignment to write about his life from A to Z, including “life lessons” at the end of each entry. Though things do go Joe’s way, the story is nothing but realistic. Howe has created a character that lives and breathes with all of the inconsistencies, fears and longings of your normal average seventh-grade homosexual. Joe still thinks “exchanging saliva” is excruciatingly gross, but he knows he wants to date boys. He thinks Colin is cute and fun to be with, but Joe just can’t “tone down” on command. His family is not surprised when he finally lets them in on his secret with the gentle assistance of his artistic Aunt Pam and his (sometimes overly) helpful best friend Addie.
The timeline overlaps the events of the companion novel, but fans of the first won’t feel déjà vu. There’s more of a sense of spending extra time with a favorite friend. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-689-83957-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Ginee Seo/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2005
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