A new Robin Hood rides in London, robbing gentlemen, humiliating rivals in Elizabeth’s Court, and threatening the reputation of Shakespeare’s theater. When actors end up dead or missing, the theater company—already seen as unsavory by many—stands to be further shamed. It’s a thrilling story of cutpurses, highwaymen, murder, intrigue, and eventually the midnight dismantling of the Burbages’ Theater. In the middle of all of this is young Richard Malory, apprentice in The Lord Hunsdon’s Men. Kit Glover, his fellow apprentice, is suspected of being an accomplice to thieves, and Richard puts his life on the line to find the truth. In the meantime, the shows must go on and readers are treated to many details of Elizabethan theater: boys playing female characters, the staging of battle scenes, the midsummer plague season, Shakespeare’s rivals, and the behavior of theater audiences. At its heart, this is about how the theater thrives and “how a good play is like life,” and fittingly, the language of the story sparkles. “Spoken words, things of shaped and polished air that flash but once, then flicker away” are the currency of Shakespeare’s plays and of Cheaney’s prose. This lively second novel in the author’s Shakespearean drama (The Playmaker, 2000) is a fine addition to the growing body of literature about Shakespeare’s world, including Susan Cooper’s King of Shadows and Gary L. Blackwood’s The Shakespeare Stealer. (map, cast of characters, historical note) (Fiction. 10+)
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-81433-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An entertaining visit to the ballpark.
A high school baseball player fights for his dream of pitching in the major leagues.
Lazarus “Laz” Weathers—so named because he almost died while being born—is a pitcher living in Jet City, a trailer park in Seattle. With a speech impediment and a learning disability, Laz believes that baseball might be the only path available to him after high school. His half brother, Antonio, is 18 months younger and also likes baseball—but lately, Antonio has been hanging out with Garrett, a small-time drug dealer, which worries Laz. After the baseball program closes at North Central High, it’s announced that Jet City will be demolished by developers, and his mother decides to move out of the city. Laz receives the opportunity of a lifetime: transfer to Laurelhurst High, which has the city’s top team, and live with the family of their star player. Knowing he’ll get better training and more exposure to college scouts in Seattle, Laz must decide whether to leave his family and chase after his dream. Deuker (Gutless, 2016, etc.) weaves an interesting plot dealing with socio-economic inequality and drug use into a cast of varied characters. Unfortunately, the secondary characters at times prove to be more interesting that the protagonist, whose characterization falls flat. With few physical descriptions or cultural markers, ethnicity is difficult to determine.
An entertaining visit to the ballpark. (Fiction. 12-18)Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-358-01242-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
Painful yet compulsively readable.
A white teen living a sheltered life seeks to break her rock-star mother out of the cycle of abuse perpetrated on their family.
Sixteen-year-old Jane lives in a large, old Victorian house with younger brother Henry, father Vernon, their cook, their gardener—and Mina, her mother, who, when she’s not out on tour with her world-famous punk band, Placenta, is confined by Vernon to a system of pneumatic tubes that traverse their house. Ever since the onset of the global pandemic over four years ago, Jane and Henry haven’t been allowed to return to school, instead receiving a bizarre regimen of home-school instruction from Vernon, while Mina watches on helplessly from her capsule in the tubes. Only when Jane stumbles on a cache of home movies—actually security camera footage from around their house dating back to her parents’ courtship days—does she begin to gain some perspective on her dysfunctional, abusive family life. In secret, she starts composing a punk opera to express her desire to save her mother from the life she seems trapped in. When Mina leaves to go on tour for Placenta’s latest album, Jane uses her wits to mount a nascent, persistent rebellion against Vernon’s toxic grip on their family’s psyche. Expertly blending fabulism with hard realism and Victorian language with contemporary teen-speak, this powerful narrative examines the myriad effects of emotional and physical abuse on a family.
Painful yet compulsively readable. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780593353974
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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