A well-wrought cautionary tale that’s fast-moving and full of surprises.
Day’s third novel about a smart but shy New York City boy finds its hero involved with a group of vigilante computer hackers.
Thirteen-year-old Sebastian Kemp is in a bad place. To prove his innocence in a cheating scam, he tried to hack his school’s computer system—and was caught, expelled, and sent to the “110 percent awful” Berkowitz High, full of kids who “bombed out” of other schools. The place isn’t all bad: Sebastian is welcomed by 15-year-old Jazmin, who has a baby daughter, and by Marty, a wannabe actor who enrolled because of the school’s theater program. But he’s terrorized by Sammy the Psycho, a bully who demands that Sebastian help him cheat on a math quiz. Unwilling to do it, Sebastian instead seeks out the Totos—a group of teenage runaways–turned–computer hackers who operate from an abandoned train car beneath Grand Central Terminal. Sebastian learns to hack and hopes to protect himself by digging up dirt on Sammy the Psycho. He finds himself empowered by the Totos’ righteous vigilantism, but is he being drawn into something more nefarious? As the answer emerges, Sebastian is confronted by teen pregnancy and homelessness, police corruption, and the insidious practice of grooming potential victims of abuse. He’s a likable protagonist—young for his age but good-hearted and nonjudgmental—and the other characters evince real personality. Day writes in the first person, present tense, narrating with a prose style that gives easy access to Sebastian’s thoughts and feelings, and the well-paced plot rattles along and avoids predictability. Some readers may quibble with how easily Sebastian becomes a master hacker, but even this fits in with the authorial injunction for readers not to be too readily accepting. Younger readers of this novel will learn, as Sebastian does, that problems rarely have easy solutions—and if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
A well-wrought cautionary tale that’s fast-moving and full of surprises.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 979-8-9854349-2-7
Page Count: 222
Publisher: Artists Gate Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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A charming friendship story and great setup for future books.
Curious about the Big Wide World outside his Sasquatch community, Hugo makes a friend who is of it.
Sasquatch Hugo’s bedroom is inside a cave and possesses the charming feature of a small stream running through it that he can sail his little toy boat on. It’s cool, but he yearns to see the Big Wide World. When he asks his smart friend Gigi if a Sasquatch might become a sailor, she says it’s possible but would be difficult—the primary rule of their people is to not be seen by Humans. Then, in everyone’s favorite Hide and Go Sneak class, which is held outside, a Human appears; Hugo laughs at the sight, drawing Human attention in a taboo-breaking mistake. Shortly after, Hugo’s toy boat floats into the cave with a Human toy—soon, it’s facilitating a pen-pal–type relationship that’s derailed when Hugo confesses to being a Sasquatch and Human Boone, a budding cryptozoologist, doesn’t believe him. How Hugo and Boone resolve this misapprehension and become friends in a joint search for the Ogopogo concludes this series opener. Potter keeps the third-person narrative tightly focused on Hugo’s perspective, and the details she uses to flesh out the Sasquatch world are delightfully playful. Sala’s drawings depict a homey Sasquatch cavern community, Boone as a freckled, white boy, and Hugo as a hairily benevolent behemoth.
A charming friendship story and great setup for future books. (final art unseen) (Fantasy. 5-9)Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4197-2859-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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