The entire collection brims with humor, pathos, and the heroic struggle to grow up.
In each of 10 stories, kids reentering the neighborhood from their school day reveal their unique narratives.
BFFs T.J. and Jasmine find their yearslong friendship getting them through parental separation, illness, and foster care. A group of four, all children of cancer survivors, has been brought together by a school counselor. A female skateboarder is the target of a bully—to the relief of his usual victim. A teen with the signs of OCD meets a street musician who changes her outlook. Two ardent gamers are caught up in the confusion of sexual questioning, and there’s an odd couple of friends whose difference in size is no barrier to their bond. A teen with a fear of dogs devises an elaborate plan to get past his neighbor’s new pet, and the class clown tries to find a way to make her overworked mother laugh. Three boys work to make their friend presentable enough to tell a classmate that he likes her. An accident sustained by the school crossing guard causes her son significant anxiety. There are connections among some of the stories: places, people, incidents. However, each story has its own center, and readers learn a great deal about each character in just a few lines. Reynolds’ gift for capturing the voices and humanity of urban teens is on full display. The cast adheres to a black default.
The entire collection brims with humor, pathos, and the heroic struggle to grow up. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-3828-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A culturally tone deaf exercise in narcissism.
Opening with a flash-forward teaser, this unpersuasive debut quickly fizzles.
The only home Luchi Ann, 13, has known is the women’s prison in northern Thailand where she was born to a jailed American mother who supervised her impressive education (history, philosophy, art, calculus and languages). After her mother dies, blonde Luchi Ann sets off alone, with the kindly warden’s blessing, to “search for answers” to the mystery of her mother’s incarceration. (Why she doesn’t just ask the warden is another mystery.) Carrying her mother’s ashes, money and a few phone numbers but little else, she accepts a ride to Bangkok with the warden’s nephew. Like the plot, Luchi Ann never achieves credibility. Puzzlingly, she neither confides in nor seeks help from sympathetic adults in Thailand. They, for their part, neither question her nor intervene to protect her. Luchi Ann’s sensibility and breathless present-tense narration, with pauses to rhapsodize about her future, belong more to an entitled girl of privilege than an orphan child adrift in an alien world. Reduced to generic, travel-brochure descriptions of countryside and city, vibrant Thailand feels drably insubstantial, the literary equivalent of an exotic background for a fashion-magazine spread. Equally generic are the Thai characters, enablers on Luchi Ann’s self-absorbed journey.
A culturally tone deaf exercise in narcissism. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8027-2297-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Unfortunate Events galore, served with relish.
The creator of such picture books as Frank Was a Monster Who Wanted to Dance (1999) and Three Nasty Gnarlies (2003) dishes up a first novel seasoned with the same delightfully twisted, ghoulish sensibility.
Immediately upon arriving in Awkward Falls, a small Manitoba town known for its canned sauerkraut and its Asylum for the Dangerously Insane (“both,” notes the narrator, “to be avoided at all costs, as one was likely to cause gas, and the other, death.”), 12-year-old Josephine meets agemate Thaddeus Hibble. Thaddeus is a scientific genius who has lived alone since infancy on an all–junk-food diet supplied by a robot butler and paid for by re-animating the dead pets of local matrons. Together the two are plunged into personal danger and worse at the clutching hands of hunchbacked lunatic cannibal Fetid Stenchley, former lab assistant and Asylum escapee. With aid from a supporting cast of colorful locals, a half-rotted corpse brought back to partial life and a ravening herd of chimerical monsters created in a secret biotechnology lab, Graves crafts a quick-moving plot composed of macabre twists. These are made all the ickier for being presented in significant part from Stenchley’s point of view. Wordless opening and closing sequences, plus a handful of interior illustrations, both fill in background detail and intensify the overall macabre atmosphere. The central characters receive just, if, under the circumstances, not necessarily final deserts.
Unfortunate Events galore, served with relish. (finished illustrations not seen) (Melodrama. 11-13)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8118-7814-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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