A portrait of the realistic bravado of teens struggling to find their place in the world.
This coming-of-age story, set in present-day Florida, may leave adult readers with a sad view of today’s teens but engage the younger crowd.
Robby Meyers is the youngest of his clan, and has always been the weakest as well, due to his premature birth. Now, at the beginning of high school, he’s experiencing puberty and is possibly more vulnerable than ever. His father is Robby’s cheerleader–he encourages him to keep up with his healthy, athletic older brothers, and Robby does his best, despite his mother’s concerns about his easily-injured body. When their father is killed in a motorcycle accident, the entire Meyers family’s world turns upside-down. When they later move to a new city, Robby experiences the pain of leaving his friends, teasing and other difficulties with new classmates, in addition to unsympathetic coaches. Still, he makes several new friends who’ll have a large impact on his life. Seemingly largely unsupervised by his mother or other adults, Robby partakes in some activities that demonstrate the questionable judgment that might be expected of a teen in turmoil, including smoking and drinking as well as obnoxious behavior to adults, including teachers. His friend Danny has coarse manners, a shockingly unsanitary home and a bad relationship with his uncle, but Robby doesn’t realize how dangerous the situation is until the climax of the story, in which Robby goes with him to a planned meeting in the dark of night. Readers learn from the epilogue whether Robby survives the ordeal, but the story ends abruptly and there is no demonstration that the other characters have learned important lessons. Appropriate for young readers who don’t mind rough language, Robby Fights the World is engaging and demonstrates making good decisions without moralizing, though it’s possible that as many bad lessons as good are included. Still, the book will likely feel authentic to teen readers.
A portrait of the realistic bravado of teens struggling to find their place in the world.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4392-5913-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
A celebratory song of the sea.
A shrimpy 13-year-old with a super-sized passion for marine life comes of age during a summer of discovery on the tidal flats of Puget Sound.
Miles O’Malley—Squid Boy to his friends—doesn’t mind being short. It’s other things that keep him awake at night, like his parents’ talk of divorce and his increasingly lustful thoughts about the girl next door. Mostly, though, it’s the ocean’s siren call that steals his sleep. During one of his moonlit kayak excursions, Miles comes across the rarest sighting ever documented in the northern Pacific: the last gasp of a Giant Squid. Scientists are stunned. The media descend. As Miles continues to stumble across other oddball findings, including two invasive species that threaten the eco-balance of Puget Sound, a nearby new-age cult’s interest in Miles prompts a headline in USA Today: Kid Messiah? Soon tourists are flocking to the tidal flats, crushing crustaceans underfoot and painting their bodies with black mud. Dodging disingenuous journalists, deluded disciples and the death-throes of his parents’ marriage, Miles tries to recapture some semblance of normality. He reads up on the G-spot and the Kama Sutra to keep pace with his pals’ bull sessions about sex (hilariously contributing “advanced” details that gross the other boys out). But Miles’s aquatic observations cannot be undone, and as summer draws to a close, inhabitants of Puget Sound prepare for a national blitzkrieg of media and scientific attention and the highest tide in 40 years, all of which threatens everything Miles holds dear. On land, the rickety plot could have used some shoring up. Miles is just too resourceful for the reader to believe his happiness—or that of those he loves—is ever at stake. But when Miles is on the water, Lynch’s first novel becomes a stunning light show, both literal, during phosphorescent plankton blooms, and metaphorical, in the poetic fireworks Lynch’s prose sets off as he describes his clearly beloved Puget Sound.
A celebratory song of the sea.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-605-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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