A stellar read for teens and adults, full of hilarious growing pains, tenderness and a few surprises.
Moser’s debut is an unflinching young-adult novel that sees a group of friends tested by bigotry and the illegal machinations of a religious cult.
In Boulder Creek, Wash., Maurice “Mo” Kirkland is a teenage runt with everything to prove. Bullies want to dunk his head in a toilet—and could do it daily if not for the intervention of Mo’s best friends, Max and Kazzy. The three stick together in a school that loves to mock Mo for being short and having two moms and Kazzy for being a member of the nature-worshipping Bethlehem cult (in which she’s called Prophecy). As the trio proceeds through high school, Mo realizes he’s deeply in love with Kazzy; she, meanwhile, learns that the government wants her and the 60-plus members of the Bethlehem “family” to pay decades’ worth of property taxes or have their ranch confiscated. Everyone hopes that a series of “vision quests” will help to resolve their dilemma. Toward that end, Max and Mo hike into the mountains with a young man named Clean. Instead of finding spiritual enlightenment, however, the two boys are coerced by Clean into smuggling crystal meth down from Canada. Now the pair must cope with breaking the law—and possibly ruining Boulder Creek as the drugs are sold—to keep Kazzy in their lives. Debut author Moser serves up an irresistibly wisecracking narrator in Mo. Every page ripples with a controlled cleverness that seasoned writers might envy; Mo says of his height, “If I’d shown up at school wearing a leash and chewing a Frisbee, no one would have noticed.” There’s also a rawness to this tale similar to that which many teens face in the real world. Words like “cracker” and “faggot” appear frequently. Moser can wax rhapsodic about young love, but he shows that he knows how to raise the tension in the second half of the novel as the Bethlehem group trades tolerance for violence.
A stellar read for teens and adults, full of hilarious growing pains, tenderness and a few surprises.Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 237
Publisher: Amazon Digital Services
Review Posted Online: Jan. 10, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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