A work of fiction compassionately portrays an underrepresented disorder.
A novel explores the daily challenges a young girl with Tourette’s syndrome faces.
Twelve-year-old Isabella “Izzy” Palmer confronts more than the usual middle school social problems. Her goal: “I want to be like everybody else. I want to be normal.” But Izzy isn’t exactly normal. Her Tourette’s diagnosis means she needs to resist physical urges. She exhibits signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder and, most embarrassingly, emits loud grunts or other noises. The neurological disorder makes her stand out at school and provides ample fodder for teasing. Her loyal friend Abbie helps her to feel more natural, but every day is a struggle (“Tourette Syndrome is not easy on anyone. Not on the person who has it, their family, or their friends”). Given an opportunity to try out for the school softball team, Izzy decides to attempt what seems so easy for other students but proves quite daunting for her. She tries to control her behavior and not give in to the extreme fatigue caused as a side effect of her medications. Her friends and parents help her practice her skills, and Coach Grant makes an honest effort to understand what accommodations might help Izzy. But Izzy gets discouraged and wonders if she would have more energy and play better by skipping her meds. It only takes a couple weeks for the symptoms to worsen to an excessive degree. Izzy learns a hard lesson: She has to reconcile her lifestyle with her meds. But she finds that success is possible with patience and practice. In her empathetic novel “dedicated to all children who dare to be different,” McLaughlin’s (Fireworks, 2017, etc.) teaching background is evident in how realistically she depicts the complicated middle school social structure and Izzy’s parents’ ongoing struggle to deal with the needs of a complicated tween. But the depth of Izzy’s world is also the tale’s flaw because it speaks to the middle school audience as if it were an adult fiction title bordering on self-help. The writing will likely appeal more to parents than middle school students. Still, the book is a particularly useful tool for support groups.
A work of fiction compassionately portrays an underrepresented disorder.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9995773-2-5
Page Count: 178
Publisher: Absolute Love Publishing
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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