An engaging tale highlighting the fragility and the puerility of the human condition.
A tongue-in-cheek novella that takes young love and teen angst to a higher power.
Teenager Michael Night is 10,000 years old—a bit long in the tooth to be a normal teen but not a teen angel. A former nerd, Michael made some changes in order to hang out with the “cool kids” and is a warrior-in-training at the Academy of Attack & Defend. When God tunes his flat screen TV (“a gift from Steve Jobs”) to the Earth station, he is disappointed and disgusted at what he sees—war, greed, corruption, hate, Duck Dynasty and Honey Boo Boo—and he decides to do something about it. So, God instructs Michael to annihilate Earth. Without batting an eye, Michael accepts his mission. Arriving in the laid-back beach community of Paradise, California, Michael isn’t prepared for what happens next: Shelly Bloom. Shelly is the most beautiful 16-year-old that Michael has ever seen. As his love for Shelly grows, his desire to obliterate the world wanes, and Michael begins to feel the pull of an emotion he has never before experienced—empathy. Michael soon learns that life isn’t as one dimensional as he thought. Aaron’s debut novella keeps things light with a humorous voice, yet it has a serious message to deliver—the value of humility and the danger of judging others without truly knowing them or their plights. Adding to the joviality is the narrator’s stance that humans thrive on “perception” and must be able to relate abstract concepts to tangible things—and obliges the reader by providing a face to put with the name; therefore, heaven looks like Park City, Utah, and God looks like Russell Crowe. Aaron has penned a fun satirical take on the state of our world and the often single-minded view of humans in regard to themselves, others and what it means to live life to the fullest.
An engaging tale highlighting the fragility and the puerility of the human condition.Pub Date: June 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615987743
Page Count: 74
Publisher: Serealities Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An odd, humorous tale with an inclusive message that sets out to prove everything has value, no matter how strange it seems...
A boy befriends a lonely palm tree then searches for a way to integrate it into island life in the authors’ idiosyncratic picture-book debut.
Frederick lives on a tropical island and regularly walks the Nettleberry Trail to a pink sandy beach where a fantastic palm tree—with bulging, spicy pepperoni sausages hanging from its branches—grows on the shoreline. Ridiculed and mocked by the “normal trees” with their respectable coconuts and mangoes, the poor pepperoni palm confides in the boy, who promises to find evidence of other trees like it in the universe and put an end to all the derision. Frederick consults his books and turns up nothing, so he sets off around the world looking for evidence of similar species to end his friend’s loneliness. Many years later, he returns older and wiser with news that the palm tree is unique and he has big ideas for their future, including plans to build a pizza parlor on the beach. Parrish’s vivid illustrations, bursting with color and life, compliment the zany text and bring out the strangeness of the jungle, with its screeching monkeys, sneering papaya plants and gloating banana bunches. The whole thing has a touch of Seuss about it. But you can’t help wondering what will happen to this idyllic paradise once the Pizza Place is up and running and crowds of tourists are flocking to visit the world-famous tree and restaurant.
An odd, humorous tale with an inclusive message that sets out to prove everything has value, no matter how strange it seems at first.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-9849908-8-7
Page Count: 34
Publisher: Fuze Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Unique children’s lit that cleverly tackles interest rates, endowments, fluctuating commodities, bullying and identity.
A smart kid with a head for numbers takes on a corrupt Wall Street banker, in Everett’s debut middle-grade reader.
Toby Gold, orphaned at birth, is found in a green leather handbag. He takes his name from the word “Tobias,” written on a slip of paper lying at the bottom of the bag and the unusual gold marking on the iris of his left eye. Passed from one foster family to another, young Toby longs for a stable home but finds himself going from bad to worse when he moves into his 10th house, where foster brother Eddie makes his life a misery and steals his weekly allowance. Resourceful Toby gets a job walking the dogs of a local banker and, after exacting his revenge on Eddie with the help of his friends and some chocolate pudding (so effectively in fact that the young bully hardly utters another word for the entire book), he starts to watch the stock market reports on television. With his mathematical mind, Toby deciphers secret codes in the rising and falling commodities market and soon finds himself drawn into a web of financial intrigue. He is granted a place at the local high school for rich kids, where he unearths a scandal that threatens to bring down the name of the well-renowned school. The chocolate pudding escapades and Toby’s system for nicknaming his foster parents add some light relief along the way, and although the plot is a bit far-fetched, the story engages enough. The author makes a bold attempt at integrating some complex financial issues into the story, sometimes at the expense of his characters.
Unique children’s lit that cleverly tackles interest rates, endowments, fluctuating commodities, bullying and identity.Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-1936214952
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Fiscal Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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