A contrived romance/mystery with an anticlimactic ending and exaggerated, two-dimensional characters. Coming into a small Pacific coast town to help close her deceased grandmother’s house, Jane Douglas glimpses a gray-eyed boy, and can’t get him out of her mind. She throws sensibility to the winds and joins her brassy, malicious cousin Ricki in sneaking out at night to meet him at a shabby local amusement park, where she learns that his name is Carey, and that he’s just as fascinated by her. By day, Jane watches in puzzlement as her mother, Abby, is manipulated and insulted by Ricki’s shrill, selfish mother, Norma. Thesman pumps suspense into the story with hints of a skeleton in the family closet, odd behavior, threats open and veiled, enigmatic undertones, and ominous parallels between past and present events, but none of it comes to much. When Jane’s anger at Ricki and Norma outweighs her desire to see Carey, she hustles her mother away, headed for home. Romance-minded readers will sigh over Jane’s and Carey’s moonlight trysts, but the relentlessly hateful behavior of Norma and Ricki turns them into caricatures, and the Douglas’s escape leaves all the carefully produced tension unreleased. It’s a step back for Thesman (The Storyteller’s Daughter, 1997, etc.), who shows better skills and a surer hand with character in all her previous novels. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-87959-2
Page Count: 159
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
If it were a Golden Age comic, this tale of ridiculous science, space dogs and humanoid aliens with flashlights in their hands might not be bad. Alas... Number Four is a fugitive from the planet Lorien, which is sloppily described as both "hundreds of lightyears away" and "billions of miles away." Along with eight other children and their caretakers, Number Four escaped from the Mogadorian invasion of Lorien ten years ago. Now the nine children are scattered on Earth, hiding. Luckily and fairly nonsensically, the planet's Elders cast a charm on them so they could only be killed in numerical order, but children one through three are dead, and Number Four is next. Too bad he's finally gained a friend and a girlfriend and doesn't want to run. At least his newly developing alien powers means there will be screen-ready combat and explosions. Perhaps most idiotic, "author" Pittacus Lore is a character in this fiction—but the first-person narrator is someone else entirely. Maybe this is a natural extension of lightly hidden actual author James Frey's drive to fictionalize his life, but literature it ain't. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 17, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-196955-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2010
Paulsen recalls personal experiences that he incorporated into Hatchet (1987) and its three sequels, from savage attacks by moose and mosquitoes to watching helplessly as a heart-attack victim dies. As usual, his real adventures are every bit as vivid and hair-raising as those in his fiction, and he relates them with relish—discoursing on “The Fine Art of Wilderness Nutrition,” for instance: “Something that you would never consider eating, something completely repulsive and ugly and disgusting, something so gross it would make you vomit just looking at it, becomes absolutely delicious if you’re starving.” Specific examples follow, to prove that he knows whereof he writes. The author adds incidents from his Iditarod races, describes how he made, then learned to hunt with, bow and arrow, then closes with methods of cooking outdoors sans pots or pans. It’s a patchwork, but an entertaining one, and as likely to win him new fans as to answer questions from his old ones. (Autobiography. 10-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-32650-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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