Though unrealistically pat in the end, it offers a positive message that in life, good and bad come together.
What is luck? Is it something that happens to you, or is it perhaps everything that happens to you? Emma Macintyre will have to figure that out.
As the story opens, an unsigned letter instructs Emma to write a list of 10 lucky things she wants to have happen and to check her list at month’s end to see what her good luck has brought her. Emma is not having a good eighth-grade year. Aunt Jenny—who wasn’t really her aunt but her single mom’s best friend—died six weeks ago, leaving a big hole in their lives. And her best friend, Savvy, got a new phone and is now more interested in texting, Instagramming, Snapchatting, and trying to fit in with the popular kids than in hanging out with Emma. As the month progresses, good things happen to her: She lands the lead part in the school play, falls in love (though not with the boy on her list, who turns out to be a creep); but bad things also happen: Savvy unwisely sends a topless photo of herself to a boy. In the devastating aftermath, Savvy’s moms withdraw her from school. Emma narrates, a convincing young adolescent whose close relationship with her mother is forged in part by their mutual suffering at the hands of her alcoholic WASP grandmother, who comments on the biracial girl’s “dusky coloring,” inherited from her absent Colombian dad. The savagery of middle school social dynamics will resonate.
Though unrealistically pat in the end, it offers a positive message that in life, good and bad come together. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: July 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-30652-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious.
If you made a recording to be heard by the aliens who found the iPod, what would you record?
For 11-year-old Alex Petroski, it's easy. He records everything. He records the story of how he travels to New Mexico to a rocket festival with his dog, Carl Sagan, and his rocket. He records finding out that a man with the same name and birthday as his dead father has an address in Las Vegas. He records eating at Johnny Rockets for the first time with his new friends, who are giving him a ride to find his dead father (who might not be dead!), and losing Carl Sagan in the wilds of Las Vegas, and discovering he has a half sister. He even records his own awful accident. Cheng delivers a sweet, soulful debut novel with a brilliant, refreshing structure. His characters manage to come alive through the “transcript” of Alex’s iPod recording, an odd medium that sounds like it would be confusing but really works. Taking inspiration from the Voyager Golden Record released to space in 1977, Alex, who explains he has “light brown skin,” records all the important moments of a journey that takes him from a family of two to a family of plenty.
Riveting, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-18637-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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