Tackling a familiar theme, Murray pens a compelling debut about a teenage boy with an abusive, alcoholic father. Pip, who’s usually stoned, goes into counseling to avoid getting expelled and thereby incurring even more of his father’s wrath. In the high schooler’s convincing first-person narrative, he struggles with his family’s secrets but starts to fall apart under the pressure. A helpful counselor, the boys in his group counseling sessions, and a new teacher provide some support, but it’s concern for his younger brother that gives Pip the courage to try, with mixed success, to give up drugs. Painfully believable scenes reveal his father’s drinking and violence, his mother’s addiction to Valium, and Pip’s own escape from his miserable home life through marijuana and alcohol. No easy ending ensues, but Pip’s emerging strength, realistically portrayed, bodes well for his future. (Fiction. 12+)
Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8037-2897-2
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2003
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Riveting, brutal and beautifully told.
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A devastating tale of greed and secrets springs from the summer that tore Cady’s life apart.
Cady Sinclair’s family uses its inherited wealth to ensure that each successive generation is blond, beautiful and powerful. Reunited each summer by the family patriarch on his private island, his three adult daughters and various grandchildren lead charmed, fairy-tale lives (an idea reinforced by the periodic inclusions of Cady’s reworkings of fairy tales to tell the Sinclair family story). But this is no sanitized, modern Disney fairy tale; this is Cinderella with her stepsisters’ slashed heels in bloody glass slippers. Cady’s fairy-tale retellings are dark, as is the personal tragedy that has led to her examination of the skeletons in the Sinclair castle’s closets; its rent turns out to be extracted in personal sacrifices. Brilliantly, Lockhart resists simply crucifying the Sinclairs, which might make the family’s foreshadowed tragedy predictable or even satisfying. Instead, she humanizes them (and their painful contradictions) by including nostalgic images that showcase the love shared among Cady, her two cousins closest in age, and Gat, the Heathcliff-esque figure she has always loved. Though increasingly disenchanted with the Sinclair legacy of self-absorption, the four believe family redemption is possible—if they have the courage to act. Their sincere hopes and foolish naïveté make the teens’ desperate, grand gesture all that much more tragic.
Riveting, brutal and beautifully told. (Fiction. 14 & up)Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-74126-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FAMILY | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES
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PROFILES
Ten years ago, the three Hollow sisters disappeared from an Edinburgh street while on holiday. A month later, they came back.
When Iris, Vivi, and Grey returned, they couldn’t remember anything of their ordeal. Their dark hair turned white, and their blue eyes became black. They sported identical hook-shaped scars on their necks. Despite their altered appearances, their parents were elated to return home to London with them. However, their father soon began to believe that they were not really his daughters, a conviction that led to his suicide. Since then, the story of now 17-year-old Iris and her older sisters has been like catnip to online sleuths, and their ethereal beauty and uncanny ability to bend people to their wills and intoxicate them with dangerous desire add to their mystique. When Grey, now an internationally famous fashion designer and model, goes missing, Iris and Vivi, with help from Grey’s Korean British boyfriend, Tyler, set out to find her and the truth behind their disappearance. Their search takes on a new urgency when they find a decomposing body blooming with white flowers in Grey’s apartment and they are pursued by a murderous man wearing a horned bull’s skull mask. Iris’ smart and assured narration easily carries a fast-paced story entwining themes of grief and loss with elements of folklore and some very inventive body horror. The pervasive feeling of dread builds to a shocking twist.
A lush and darkly twisted modern fairy tale. (Horror. 13-18)Pub Date: April 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-11034-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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