Engaging storytelling with diverse characters and a deft mix of mystery, the supernatural, and real-life, relatable teen...
In this sequel, two bullied middle schoolers continue to display a talent for befriending ghosts, untangling mysteries, and solving murders.
In the first installment of Paavola’s (Jack and the Beanpole, 2019, etc.) series, two smart eighth graders—tall and skinny white girl Breanne Thurman and short Sonny Etherly, who is black—bonded over their abilities to communicate with the dead and their relegation to the cafeteria “nerd table.” Now, not long after solving a murder, assisting a trio of ghosts haunting their school, and learning that they can speak to each other telepathically, the two friends face a double challenge: help five more spirits “cross over” and cope with Breanne’s relentless bully, the leader of the school’s mean girls. The first ghost, Ashni “Firefly” Patel, died a violent death at the school in the 1950s along with sad, frightened first grader Luis Sanchez and sullen Timmy O’Brien, a leather-jacketed teen. At the zoo, Breanne and Sonny meet two more ghosts of ’50s vintage, seemingly unrelated to the first three (or are they?): the zoo’s one-time veterinarian and the lion in his care. This fast-moving tale of suspense and the supernatural, told through the distinctive first-person voices of Sonny, Breanne, and Ashni, is seamlessly grounded in the real-world issue of bullying. Indeed, few characters in the book, living or dead, are (or were) unaffected by bullying, some as bullies themselves. Despite ghostly intercessions on Breanne’s behalf, Paavola doesn’t offer glib solutions. What shines through, without losing the plot’s momentum, are some root causes of bullying and the importance of a proactive school administration, communication, tools for de-escalating anger, and supportive peers and adults. Sonny has his grandmother (Grams) to confide in; Breanne has her grandfather; and they both have a sympathetic science teacher. Diversity is easily organic to the narrative, with characters described as black or white; so are Grams’ frank recollections of segregation in the ’50s, leading Sonny to understand Luis’ and Ashni’s experiences as “two ‘not-white’ kids in an all-white school.”
Engaging storytelling with diverse characters and a deft mix of mystery, the supernatural, and real-life, relatable teen issues.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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