A sweet but uneven tale about family and class.
A girl gets the chance to help her family and see how the affluent live in this debut YA novel.
Growing up in “one of the poor areas of San Carlos, a bustling and progressive Latin American city,” Juanita, 16, often takes care of her six younger siblings while her parents, Teresa and Eduardo, work. Despite their poverty, the couple have taught their children to carry themselves with dignity and kindness—but the realities of the neighborhood outside their loving home can be grim. Encounters with dangerous criminals and a lack of money to pay for hospital visits are part of everyday life. Juanita dreams of being able to get a job to help her parents and eventually lift the entire family out of poverty. She tries several times in vain to convince them to let her work at the local convenience store, but they refuse. Then one day, a large limousine enters the neighborhood by mistake. The rich Don Mendez comes into the family’s life with a proposition that could change everything. Juanita bears such a strong resemblance to Mendez’s dead daughter that he wants to bring her home with him and serve as her foster parent. In exchange, he will assist the struggling family. As Juanita enters the wealthy world of Mendez and his wife, one filled with lush decor and foie gras, she begins to question her own worth and fear of being naturally inferior. Always helpful, logical, and striving to do the right thing by her family, Juanita is an admirable role model for teen readers, and her insecurities will certainly ring true for many adolescents. But while Juanita, her family, and even Mendez are benevolent and likable in Marasigan’s charming series opener, their characterizations sometimes fall flat. “What do we need to do in order to prevent this thing from happening again?” Juanita asks her siblings after a very traumatic incident, making her sound less like a real person and more like a two-dimensional example of proper babysitting. The book also ends rather abruptly. The sequel will presumably explore the potential tensions between Juanita’s two very different worlds in greater depth.
A sweet but uneven tale about family and class.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-5255-4988-5
Page Count: 153
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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