Heart-wrenching yet hopeful.
A school shooting survivor with cerebral palsy struggles to heal.
A year after a shooting at her school, Beatrix Coughlin recounts the days before and after the tragedy in present-tense letters in verse. At home, Bea and her adoptive mom, Maxine, are supported by Lucius, their kindhearted neighbor, and his husband, Aaron. As a sixth grade Buddy to a Little at Cedar Crest Presbyterian, Bea learns card tricks to cheer up Josie Garcia, a kindergartener with anxiety. But after the shooting, neither home nor school feels safe—especially because Bea, who uses a wheelchair, couldn’t run or hide. Plagued by nightmares and terrified of loud noises, Bea feels like “a person / who cannot save herself.” But if she can’t save herself, how can she help when it seems like “everybody is fighting for change” to gun control laws? Sumner, who based the story on a school shooting in her Nashville community, poignantly portrays the devastation that gun violence wreaks while leaving room for hope. While she doesn’t sugarcoat Bea’s terror, grief, or post-traumatic stress, the verse format allows readers to process the events piece by piece, tempering the vivid emotional imagery. Bea’s gradual improvement via equine therapy and Max’s emphatic support are heartening, and readers will root both for Bea’s recovery and for adults in power to “please pay attention / and then / act.” Bea and Max are implied white, and there’s racial diversity among the secondary characters.
Heart-wrenching yet hopeful. (author’s note) (Verse fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: April 15, 2025
ISBN: 9781665956079
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
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
An endearing protagonist runs the first, fast leg of Reynolds' promising relay.
Castle “Ghost” Cranshaw feels like he’s been running ever since his dad pulled that gun on him and his mom—and used it.
His dad’s been in jail three years now, but Ghost still feels the trauma, which is probably at the root of the many “altercations” he gets into at middle school. When he inserts himself into a practice for a local elite track team, the Defenders, he’s fast enough that the hard-as-nails coach decides to put him on the team. Ghost is surprised to find himself caring enough about being on the team that he curbs his behavior to avoid “altercations.” But Ma doesn’t have money to spare on things like fancy running shoes, so Ghost shoplifts a pair that make his feet feel impossibly light—and his conscience correspondingly heavy. Ghost’s narration is candid and colloquial, reminiscent of such original voices as Bud Caldwell and Joey Pigza; his level of self-understanding is both believably childlike and disarming in its perception. He is self-focused enough that secondary characters initially feel one-dimensional, Coach in particular, but as he gets to know them better, so do readers, in a way that unfolds naturally and pleasingly. His three fellow “newbies” on the Defenders await their turns to star in subsequent series outings. Characters are black by default; those few white people in Ghost’s world are described as such.
An endearing protagonist runs the first, fast leg of Reynolds' promising relay. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-5015-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
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