Love and equality shape the past and future in this captivating tale.
This YA debut sees two teenage girls switch places in time with significant repercussions.
Fifteen-year-old Sonnet McKay, originally from South Africa, is visiting her grandfather in Seattle for the summer. One day, she explores the abandoned town of Monte Cristo with her twin brother, Evan; her sister, 16-year-old Jules; and their teenage cousins Lia and Niki. Also present is Evan’s friend Rapp Loken, on whom Sonnet has a major crush. After the group enters a decrepit mansion, Sonnet and Rapp go upstairs to a bedroom. Rapp dares her to hide inside the closet as a prank on the others. As Sonnet does so, a gust of wind blows through the window and slams the closet door behind her. She suffers a confusing, painful tumble through “shimmery air,” then wakes up surrounded by people who think her name is Emma. Meanwhile, 15-year-old Emma Sweetwine, from 1895, has likewise fallen through a closet—her own, in her parents’ Monte Cristo home. She wakes in 2015, surrounded by Rapp and company, who nearly mistake her for Sonnet. At first, neither girl can believe her circumstances. But as events roll forward, Sonnet and Emma acclimate to their new centuries and learn that getting back home will require planning, determination, and love. In her novel, Von Schleh tackles one of the more devilish sci-fi conundrums, time travel, with gusto. She meticulously inserts the teens—who are spitting images of each other—into culture-shock scenarios relating to language, clothing, and etiquette, both personal and societal. Sonnet finds the enforcement of Victorian norms by Emma’s mother insufferable, for the woman has a “laser-like focus on me” that’s “a nonstop tsunami, boring down, pounding...on the shores of my new life.” Conversely, the modern freedoms Emma enjoys, reluctantly at first, provide heartbreaking revelations. About her peers’ speech, she notices: “Nothing was strained through a sieve, picked apart, and checked for merit or effect before being spoken.” Von Schleh uses the time-travel device to illustrate robust interior lives for her characters, and in the end, their romantic and familial verisimilitude enhances an already fabulous twist.
Love and equality shape the past and future in this captivating tale.Pub Date: June 12, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943006-58-8
Page Count: 312
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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