A wry, beguiling romance that’s passionate about faith and love.
Two devoutly religious teenage boys fall in love and struggle to find acceptance in this YA coming-out novel.
Charlie is a 16-year-old kid in a small Illinois town who loves theater and is gravitating from Roman Catholicism to a Baptist youth group. Tim is the son of the new pastor at Calvary Baptist Church and a student at Charlie’s high school; the two meet online and bond despite having opposing opinions on ice cream sprinkles and cargo shorts. Tim invites Charlie to church, where they weather a nosy parishioner. Charlie invites Tim to drama club; the two get in a car crash on their way to a bowling alley (with no injuries); and it seems as if they have a sunny future being “in love with Jesus and in love with each other.” Unfortunately, they are inhibited by the difficulties of making their relationship public. Charlie has an easier time of it: He comes out to a friend and his sympathetic drama teacher, neither of whom seems surprised by the news. But Tim is more furtive, having already been forced into therapy for his inclinations by his parents, and freaks out when Charlie holds his hand in drama club. It seems as if the only thing holding their relationship together is a small voice they hear in their hearts telling them that God accepts them. Shoemaker makes his characters’ religiosity and gay sexuality equally central—and harmonious—parts of their personalities, treating them seriously but in a usually lighthearted tone. He crafts complex, convincing characters and fleshes them out in supple prose and spot-on dialogue that’s split between awkward adolescent self-consciousness—“Okay, so I want to say something dumb but, it’s just that, I kind of almost maybe more than like you,” says Tim—and more knowing, adult reflections. (“Mother will love it and she will cry,’ Charlie muses about his bit part in a school play, “and she will bring me flowers and she will cry, and she will hug me afterwards like seventeen relatives suddenly died and she is so pleased that I was not among them and she will cry.”) Readers will root for Charlie and Tim to find their way through the thicket of anxieties and droll snark to happiness.
A wry, beguiling romance that’s passionate about faith and love.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2021
ISBN: 979-8490557258
Page Count: 153
Publisher: Independently Published
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away.
A Mexican American boy takes on heavy responsibilities when his family is torn apart.
Mateo’s life is turned upside down the day U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents show up unsuccessfully seeking his Pa at his New York City bodega. The Garcias live in fear until the day both parents are picked up; his Pa is taken to jail and his Ma to a detention center. The adults around Mateo offer support to him and his 7-year-old sister, Sophie, however, he knows he is now responsible for caring for her and the bodega as well as trying to survive junior year—that is, if he wants to fulfill his dream to enter the drama program at the Tisch School of the Arts and become an actor. Mateo’s relationships with his friends Kimmie and Adam (a potential love interest) also suffer repercussions as he keeps his situation a secret. Kimmie is half Korean (her other half is unspecified) and Adam is Italian American; Mateo feels disconnected from them, less American, and with worries they can’t understand. He talks himself out of choosing a safer course of action, a decision that deepens the story. Mateo’s self-awareness and inner monologue at times make him seem older than 16, and, with significant turmoil in the main plot, some side elements feel underdeveloped. Aleman’s narrative joins the ranks of heart-wrenching stories of migrant families who have been separated.
An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5605-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting, brutal and beautifully told.
A devastating tale of greed and secrets springs from the summer that tore Cady’s life apart.
Cady Sinclair’s family uses its inherited wealth to ensure that each successive generation is blond, beautiful and powerful. Reunited each summer by the family patriarch on his private island, his three adult daughters and various grandchildren lead charmed, fairy-tale lives (an idea reinforced by the periodic inclusions of Cady’s reworkings of fairy tales to tell the Sinclair family story). But this is no sanitized, modern Disney fairy tale; this is Cinderella with her stepsisters’ slashed heels in bloody glass slippers. Cady’s fairy-tale retellings are dark, as is the personal tragedy that has led to her examination of the skeletons in the Sinclair castle’s closets; its rent turns out to be extracted in personal sacrifices. Brilliantly, Lockhart resists simply crucifying the Sinclairs, which might make the family’s foreshadowed tragedy predictable or even satisfying. Instead, she humanizes them (and their painful contradictions) by including nostalgic images that showcase the love shared among Cady, her two cousins closest in age, and Gat, the Heathcliff-esque figure she has always loved. Though increasingly disenchanted with the Sinclair legacy of self-absorption, the four believe family redemption is possible—if they have the courage to act. Their sincere hopes and foolish naïveté make the teens’ desperate, grand gesture all that much more tragic.
Riveting, brutal and beautifully told. (Fiction. 14 & up)Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-74126-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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