This ode to sisterhood and strength leads up to an unexpected and thoroughly satisfying conclusion.
When a mysterious package offers aspiring ballerina Sylvie a clue regarding her missing older sister’s whereabouts, she leaps at the chance to find Julia and bring her home.
It’s been one year since 16-year-old Sylvie’s sister Julia left New York; one year spent trying to fill her shoes at the National Ballet Theatre Academy while everyone pretends Julia didn’t overdose on painkillers after a career-ending injury. The only sibling still living at home—artist brother Everett lives in Nashville—Sylvie navigates lingering feelings of betrayal, grief, and guilt alone until she discovers a cryptic list of names in her childhood book of fairy tales. Believing this is Julia’s call for help, she embarks on a road trip with her best friend’s inscrutable older brother, Jack, down the East Coast to find the people on the list and, hopefully, Julia herself. Against a soundtrack of Fleetwood Mac, Sylvie and Jack grow closer, exploring class differences, familial anxieties, and their own distinct identities in the process, but the real love story is between Sylvie and her siblings. McNally’s (Girls in the Moon, 2016, etc.) vivid imagery and exquisite, poetic language—with an ever so slightly sinister undercurrent—weave shimmering, slow-building tension throughout. Most major characters appear straight and white, but some secondary characters are people of color and gay men.
This ode to sisterhood and strength leads up to an unexpected and thoroughly satisfying conclusion. (resources) (Fiction. 13-18)Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-243627-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: HarperTeen
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
An enticing, turbulent, and satisfying final voyage.
Adrian, the youngest of the Montague siblings, sails into tumultuous waters in search of answers about himself, the sudden death of his mother, and her mysterious, cracked spyglass.
On the summer solstice less than a year ago, Caroline Montague fell off a cliff in Aberdeen into the sea. When the Scottish hostel where she was staying sends a box of her left-behind belongings to London, Adrian—an anxious, White nobleman on the cusp of joining Parliament—discovers one of his mother’s most treasured possessions, an antique spyglass. She acquired it when she was the sole survivor of a shipwreck many years earlier. His mother always carried that spyglass with her, but on the day of her death, she had left it behind in her room. Although he never knew its full significance, Adrian is haunted by new questions and is certain the spyglass will lead him to the truth. Once again, Lee crafts an absorbing adventure with dangerous stakes, dynamic character growth, sharp social and political commentary, and a storm of emotion. Inseparable from his external search for answers about his mother, Adrian seeks a solution for himself, an end to his struggle with mental illness—a journey handled with hopeful, gentle honesty that validates the experiences of both good and bad days. Characters from the first two books play significant secondary roles, and the resolution ties up their loose ends. Humorous antics provide a well-measured balance with the heavier themes.
An enticing, turbulent, and satisfying final voyage. (Historical fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-291601-3
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
A coming-of-age narrative with no easy answers but in which hope blooms.
Pulled between her feelings of obligation to her family and the lure of her own dreams, Sol must find a way to straddle both political and personal borderlands.
Sol means sun in Spanish, and it embodies the effervescent young woman Sol strives to be. But her name is short for Soledad, which means solitude and represents not only the feast day on which she was born, but the isolation she has felt since her mother died. By virtue of her birth, she is the only U.S. citizen in her family, so she can attend a high school across the border from Tijuana—and even one day a U.S. university, something she has long dreamed of. For now, though, it also means she’s the only one eligible to work in the States. As her family struggles with grief, Sol shoulders the burden of supporting them financially. On the one hand, living with friends on the California side of the border opens up opportunities to cultivate new relationships and renew old ones. On the other hand, she misses seeing her family every day. The push and pull between her desires and obligations in both Mexico and the U.S. turns the border into a liminal space that represents the dichotomy and tension it requires to balance between being Sol and Soledad. Though outside tensions build to a climactic moment, the story’s heart lies within Sol’s first-person stream-of-consciousness narration.
A coming-of-age narrative with no easy answers but in which hope blooms. (Fiction. 13-18)Pub Date: March 21, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-316-70447-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 13, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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