by Jennifer Caloyeras ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 2015
Entertaining if imperfect, but perhaps a source of comfort for angry teens.
Sixteen-year-old Iris seems almost as much of a stray as Roman, the three-legged pit bull mix she’s tasked with training as community-service punishment for an outburst at school.
When her mother died two years ago, her distracted father responded by moving them up the coast to Santa Cruz. Ever since, Iris has had trouble with her seething anger. Normally, she dissipates the fury by pounding her closet wall with a hammer. But after her boyfriend dumps her and her English teacher grabs the notebook in which she keeps a list of people she wishes she could kill—including that teacher—she gets in a tussle resulting in her arrest. The dog-training sessions with a group of other struggling teens are challenging. Iris is afraid of dogs, and Roman is unpredictably aggressive. After he scares a man and his son, Roman is sent to the pound, in serious danger of being euthanized. Accepting responsibility for his predicament, letting a discerning teacher understand her situation, and allowing Oak, a caring young man in the dog-training group, to help her all move Iris toward a better place. Ironically, for a wall smasher, she has ample insight, which she often tells rather than showing in her narration. An oft-repeated metaphor equating her anger to rising water grows old, and some plot elements are way too convenient.
Entertaining if imperfect, but perhaps a source of comfort for angry teens. (Fiction. 11-16)Pub Date: May 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61822-037-0
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Ashland Creek Press
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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by Ashley Juergens ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 22, 2010
Ghostwritten for a fictional 13-year-old character on the ABC Family network show Secret Life of the American Teenager, this September-to-August journal recaps the first season and part of the second—from 15-year-old sister Amy’s revelation that she’s pregnant through her parents’ divorce and the news that her mother herself is expecting. In the snarky tone she generally takes onscreen, narrator Ashley relates events from her own point of view and elaborates on them in long, wordy entries replete with adolescent self-assurance. Of a run-in with the school principal, for instance: “I think the real reason I got into trouble was because I expressed my individuality. It tends to scare authority figures when someone my age does that.” This “enhanced” e-book includes 10 brief video clips embedded in the general vicinity of their relevant passages. There is also a closing page of links to expedite the posting of reader ratings and reviews. Aside from a pair of footnotes pushed to a screen at the end, far away from their original contexts, the translation to digital format works seamlessly for reading/viewing in either single-page/portrait or double-page/landscape orientation. There’s enough standard-issue teen and domestic drama here to keep fans of such fare reading, but devotees of the show may be disappointed at the lack of significant new content, either in the narrative itself or in the e-book’s media features. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: June 22, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4013-9596-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
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by Keith Graves & illustrated by Keith Graves ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2011
Unfortunate Events galore, served with relish.
The creator of such picture books as Frank Was a Monster Who Wanted to Dance (1999) and Three Nasty Gnarlies (2003) dishes up a first novel seasoned with the same delightfully twisted, ghoulish sensibility.
Immediately upon arriving in Awkward Falls, a small Manitoba town known for its canned sauerkraut and its Asylum for the Dangerously Insane (“both,” notes the narrator, “to be avoided at all costs, as one was likely to cause gas, and the other, death.”), 12-year-old Josephine meets agemate Thaddeus Hibble. Thaddeus is a scientific genius who has lived alone since infancy on an all–junk-food diet supplied by a robot butler and paid for by re-animating the dead pets of local matrons. Together the two are plunged into personal danger and worse at the clutching hands of hunchbacked lunatic cannibal Fetid Stenchley, former lab assistant and Asylum escapee. With aid from a supporting cast of colorful locals, a half-rotted corpse brought back to partial life and a ravening herd of chimerical monsters created in a secret biotechnology lab, Graves crafts a quick-moving plot composed of macabre twists. These are made all the ickier for being presented in significant part from Stenchley’s point of view. Wordless opening and closing sequences, plus a handful of interior illustrations, both fill in background detail and intensify the overall macabre atmosphere. The central characters receive just, if, under the circumstances, not necessarily final deserts.
Unfortunate Events galore, served with relish. (finished illustrations not seen) (Melodrama. 11-13)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8118-7814-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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