An exuberant fantasy that earnestly explores its teen protagonist’s problems.
This debut YA novel tells of a family coping with a mother’s firm belief that she’s a mermaid.
In Columbus, Nebraska, 16-year-old Emily Parker is driving with her mother, Nora, in the passenger seat. When another car rear-ends them, her mom hits her head. Soon after Nora is discharged from the hospital, she becomes frantic because, for some reason, she thinks she’s missing a tail—one that was “aqua and turquoise with flecks of gold in the sunlight.” She further insists that if she isn’t returned to the Pacific Ocean, she’ll die. There’s a long waiting list at the hospital, so Emily’s dad, Bart, does all he can to comfort Nora at home, including pretending to be the dashing pirate that his wife now believes him to be. Emily’s 6-year-old sister, Amy, loves Nora’s transformation, but the teen loathes it—and the additional responsibilities that it entails. She now has to drive Nora to therapy and swimming sessions when she’d rather work with her school crush, José Hernandez, on a Shakespeare project. As the family’s life becomes more hectic, other changes occur: Nora loses quite a bit of weight and rekindles her relationship with Bart. However, when her personality change is imitated by others and becomes a phenomenon, Emily tries a new tactic to try to bring her mom back to her old self. Author Lilo’s YA fantasy is hilarious and touching, by turns, and it perfectly blends its teenage struggles with grown-up drama as it develops its characters. Nora, a no-nonsense Child Protective Services attorney, is described as never being able to relax because “She was too busy saving the world”; she’s also shown to have raised Emily with an awareness of her privilege, yet the girl “rarely [feels] comfortable” in her own skin. The author also weighs in on aspects of social media, which amplifies Nora’s problems. Lilo provides a memorable supporting cast throughout, including Emily’s rule-breaking grandmother and her 20-year-old swim coach, Tia. It all builds toward a suspenseful finale that respects the surrealism of the plot and the integrity of the characters.
An exuberant fantasy that earnestly explores its teen protagonist’s problems.Pub Date: June 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72173-443-6
Page Count: 250
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
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