Enjoyable light romance with emotional baggage—call it an early winter beach read.
A snowstorm on New Year’s Eve closes Denver International Airport, canceling flights and stranding passengers; for Ryn, immobilized by grief since the death of her best friend, Lottie, a year ago, getting stuck might be just what she needs to move on.
Ryn has a meet-cute with Xander, a fellow stranded passenger and the attractive, biracial son of celebrity psychologists (white mom, African-American dad), when they accidentally exchange cellphones. Once the white teen has verified her phone still contains Lottie’s last, unread message, the two wander the airport, eat, talk, separate, and meet up again. In between, Ryn rescues Troy, a 13-year-old white child prodigy and Harvard grad student who’s on a mission to locate clues said to be secret code predicting an Illuminati-generated apocalypse. The three attend an impromptu party in an airport hotel room that their airport-employee hosts, Siri (black) and Jimmy (white), have decorated creatively with airport gleanings. As night wears on, Ryn and Xander probe each other’s secrets with interesting results. An assault of flashbacks to Ryn’s friendship with Lottie weighs down the briskly entertaining plot. Unlike the lively, multicultural airport employees, denizens, and strandees, Lottie’s a stock character, the wild white party girl, maddening but lovable, beautiful and rich, now tragically deceased. Readers, like grounded travelers, are stuck in the past with Lottie or, later, in glum therapy sessions with Ryn when they’d rather be checking out Illuminati clues with Troy or playing Stranded Passenger Bingo with Siri and Jimmy.
Enjoyable light romance with emotional baggage—call it an early winter beach read. (Fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: Nov. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-9918-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
A fast-paced book about healing through helping others, speaking up and physical self-defense
Unable to speak of her assault, a 17-year-old girl begins acting out.
Friends and family don't understand why Tori's shaved her head and started fighting. Sure, they know she broke up with Matt, but that's no reason to sock a stranger right in the nose. Tori's got a lot of free time right now: Her hair-trigger rage drives her friends away, and an alleyway fight leaves her too injured for the soccer team. It's almost a good thing her parents are forcing her to do community service, if only to fill the days and distract her from the invasive, frightening text messages from Matt. As a volunteer at a battered women's shelter, Tori bonds with a particularly troubled girl, encouraging the child to reach beyond her own nightmares and rescuing her from a deadly situation. Tori's emergence from trauma is lightly sketched, a shorthand recovery that relies on narrative conventions rather than character development—making for an easy read about a hard topic, which is no bad thing. Unusually, her coming of age requires not that she stop being violent but that she learn to apply violence appropriately.
A fast-paced book about healing through helping others, speaking up and physical self-defense . (Fiction. 13-15)Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4598-0828-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Orca
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
An emotionally rich coming-of-age love story.
The best of friends chart new territory during their sophomore year.
Hailey and Lima have always been two peas in a pod, but the times they are a-changing. After Hailey loses her virginity to an anonymous beach bum over summer break, she's got nothing on her mind but school hottie Nate and hanging with the cool kids. Lima finds herself increasingly left behind, hanging with the so-called "dangerous" crowd to fill Hailey's absence. Complications grow even larger once it's made clear Nate's got a thing for Lima and couldn't care less for Hailey. Some of the drama may be contrived, but the novel's heart is in the right place: beating hard and fast as the author examines the implosion of a long-term friendship. The emotional jump from middle school to high school is handled expertly here, creating a strong platonic love story between the two girls. Less interesting are some of the tertiary characters: The cool kids and alternative kids are both drawn pretty thinly, but that's almost beside the point. The two groups are used as provocative bits of narrative tissue, needling both of the protagonists and eliciting emotional, intellectual and sexual awakenings. By novel's end, both young teens are closer to the women they will eventually become. Whether or not their friendship endures is up to readers to decide.
An emotionally rich coming-of-age love story. (Fiction. 14-16)Pub Date: April 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8037-4168-3
Page Count: 389
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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