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
Aspiring filmmaker/first-novelist Chbosky adds an upbeat ending to a tale of teenaged angst—the right combination of realism and uplift to allow it on high school reading lists, though some might object to the sexuality, drinking, and dope-smoking. More sophisticated readers might object to the rip-off of Salinger, though Chbosky pays homage by having his protagonist read Catcher in the Rye. Like Holden, Charlie oozes sincerity, rails against celebrity phoniness, and feels an extraliterary bond with his favorite writers (Harper Lee, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Ayn Rand, etc.). But Charlie’s no rich kid: the third child in a middle-class family, he attends public school in western Pennsylvania, has an older brother who plays football at Penn State, and an older sister who worries about boys a lot. An epistolary novel addressed to an anonymous “friend,” Charlie’s letters cover his first year in high school, a time haunted by the recent suicide of his best friend. Always quick to shed tears, Charlie also feels guilty about the death of his Aunt Helen, a troubled woman who lived with Charlie’s family at the time of her fatal car wreck. Though he begins as a friendless observer, Charlie is soon pals with seniors Patrick and Sam (for Samantha), stepsiblings who include Charlie in their circle, where he smokes pot for the first time, drops acid, and falls madly in love with the inaccessible Sam. His first relationship ends miserably because Charlie remains compulsively honest, though he proves a loyal friend (to Patrick when he’s gay-bashed) and brother (when his sister needs an abortion). Depressed when all his friends prepare for college, Charlie has a catatonic breakdown, which resolves itself neatly and reveals a long-repressed truth about Aunt Helen. A plain-written narrative suggesting that passivity, and thinking too much, lead to confusion and anxiety. Perhaps the folks at (co-publisher) MTV see the synergy here with Daria or any number of videos by the sensitive singer-songwriters they feature.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02734-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: MTV Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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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