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
Long after the destruction of society, a tribe of Amazons lives an ascetic life. Along with the other young women of her community, Keller longs to become a Tracker, guarding the borders from mutant, deviant men. She doesn’t want to be dragged into political machinations: not those of her secret-keeping teachers; nor those of the ruling Committee who decide when the girls will be impregnated; nor those of the other Novice Trackers’ prohibited cliques. The most popular of the Novices, Laing, has discovered a cache of secrets and is reveling in its forbidden discoveries: press-on fingernails, names that end in i and y, makeup, social manipulation. Meanwhile, the all-powerful Committee Chair publicly flaunts a different taboo femininity, riding sidesaddle in Victorian garb. Oddly, the girls relate exclusively to glamorous 20th-/21st-century Western models, although the limited sources available to them also portray young girls, athletes and women in niqab. Nevertheless, secrets revealed make for a compelling emotional journey for Keller in this possible series opener, despite the incongruous obsession with 21st-century mores. (Dystopian science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9064-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2010
Gleeful Alien-esque action adventure. Cheney has spent every one of his 17 years on a spaceship (33 years if you count the time in suspended animation). One day, he knows, Plexus will land on a planet, but space is home. His life is birthday parties, dinner with his parents and work rotations until the fateful day where they hit a mysterious wave in space. It’s a subatomic radiation wave, or the universal life force or... really, the details don’t matter. The point is, suddenly the ship turns alive. What used to be floating laundry units, transport shuttles and scientific equipment are now enormous oozing cells and acidic carnivores, and every last piece wants to kill the humans. The race-against-time adventure is chock-full of scientific revelations, gruesome corpses and a marvelously gratuitous samurai sword. Even the requisite escape through the air ducts is made more exciting when the living ship has an asthma attack. Packed with thrills, this deserves equally over-the-top CGI. In a word—AWESOME. (Science fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-15-206193-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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