Another romance about a girl who needs a boy to find her way.
Teen love drama goes to summer stock.
Rainie Langdon’s friends know where their lives are headed, but the white girl’s own life is directionless. She has no goals, no follow-through. Enter “#nofilter-perfect” blond, blue-eyed white boy Tuck Brady. Tuck’s theater-class monologue about being adrift on the sea of life speaks to Rainie. Lightning strike! She’s found her passion, her purpose: Tuck. His attention to Rainie, nonexistent until now, is borderline creepy, but she wants him. Rainie convinces her former bestie, Ella Reynolds, also white, to pull some family strings so she can follow Tuck to summer stock. Upon finding out Tuck has a girlfriend, Rainie tries to bail, but frenemy Ella blackmails her into staying. Tuck is definitely interested in her, but he needs to remain faithful for the summer, and Rainie is fine being on hold until school starts. Enter boy No. 2: sexy, Mexican-American photographer Milo Cabrera. He’s available now and seems interested in Rainie, but he’s also Ella’s ex, which could mean more tension in the girls’ tenuous friendship. Does Rainie want to give up the ghost and pursue him instead? This rom-com follows a familiar, undemanding path. Though Klein plants several instances of metafictive irony about girls who care what boys think, Rainie is so single-minded it’s hard to tell whether this is intentionally tongue-in-cheek or coincidence.
Another romance about a girl who needs a boy to find her way. (Fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5247-0004-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Flat secondary characterizations and humdrum dialogue won’t keep teens from relishing this histrionic tale of love, death...
Wealthy high school junior Mcalister “Caggie” Caulfield seeks relief from grief over her younger sister’s death by entering into a dangerous relationship with a mysterious boy.
After her little sister drowns in the pool at her family’s beach house in the Hamptons, Caggie wants to die too, to the point that she contemplates jumping off the roof at a friend’s party in Manhattan. A schoolmate named Kristen saves her at the last minute but nearly falls herself. Caggie actually ends up pulling Kristen back and is credited as a hero, which only makes her feel worse. In her grief, Caggie spurns the attentions of her best friend and devoted boyfriend, but she finds a kindred spirit in Astor, a tall, dark and damaged new boy at school who recently lost his mother to cancer. But what Caggie comes to realize about her relationship with Astor is that “[d]arkness stacked on darkness just makes it that much harder to find the light.” After another nearly fatal disaster with Astor at the beach house, Caggie is forced to confront the falsehoods she has told her family and friends and let go of her guilt over her sister’s death. Though Caggie makes a point of telling readers that her paternal grandfather called people like her “phony,” almost nothing is made of the connection to Catcher in the Rye, and it serves merely to make Caggie’s tale suffer by comparison.
Flat secondary characterizations and humdrum dialogue won’t keep teens from relishing this histrionic tale of love, death and lies. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: March 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4424-3316-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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