An authentic teen protagonist faces and learns from realistic life challenges.
In Agals’ middle-grade novel, a seventh grader’s thorny problems multiply when he discovers adults gathering for a secret ritual.
Life is complicated enough for 13-year-old paperboy Eddie Diamantopoulos without throwing a possibly bloodthirsty cult into the mix: Two guys keep picking on him in school, he’s in danger of flunking English, and he’s bothered that he and the popular girl he’s taking to the school dance don’t have much to talk about. When Eddie chances upon what appears to be a weird, ritualistic setup involving missing dogs in a customer’s garage, he and his friends decide to investigate. Eddie, outwardly confident and self-sufficient but inwardly unsure, is the appealing first-person narrator of this Queens, New York–set narrative, which takes place at the end of 1959 and into 1960 (a time characterized by wall-mounted telephones, Schwinn bikes, saddle shoes, the Lindy hop, Lawrence Welk on TV, and daily print newspapers delivered by kids on bikes). The author’s first novel, Growing Up on the Appalachian Trail (2022), was aimed at younger children; here, Agals offers older readers more serious fare, at times with an overtly instructive tone as Eddie faces an array of life lessons, including his realization that his past acting-out in anger was a reaction to his parents’ violent arguments and bitter divorce. (“I’m a little better now, just a little,” he asserts.) Eddie’s developing self-awareness, reflected in his thoughts and actions, effectively underscores the novel’s theme: the acceptance of diversity in people and religions, which is fostered by communication, empathy, and education. Illustrating this theme, a Jewish father doesn’t want his daughter dating Eddie’s non-Jewish friend; Eddie, who is white and Protestant, loses his Catholic girlfriend to a Catholic boy and comes to understand why the two Black boys in his school have been picking on him. Eddie and his friends’ misinterpretation of a spiritual rite sparks a conversation about world religions, including Shintoism, which is practiced by Eddie’s Japanese friend.
An authentic teen protagonist faces and learns from realistic life challenges.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2025
ISBN: 9798899502125
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Spines
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK TO SCREEN
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