Clarke (Al Capsella and the Watchdogs, 1991) strews this dark comedy with caricatured adults and older Melbourne teenagers clinging to adolescence. After another Saturday night making the club scene, Jasper (who is 19 and a brick salesman by day) stumbles home, losing his mate Vinny somewhere along the way. He assumes Vinny will show up, but he’s wrong; Vinny is not at any of his friends’ homes, doesn’t pick up his car from Jasper, and doesn’t show up for his job at the car wash on Sunday. An anxious hunt begins. Using at least ten points of view, plus a variety of ominous dreams, nameless feelings of dread, and the like, Clarke creates a patchy, faintly suspenseful tale in which the cast’s love lives, private yearnings, and apprehension at the looming prospect of adulthood share the front seat with the central mystery. Yet neither the satire nor the cautionary message are delivered with any particular zing. Readers may have dismissed the entire episode by the time Vinny reappears late Sunday night, groggy but unharmed, having blithely accepted a ride and a spiked drink from a seemingly inoffensive stranger, and woken up on a train with no memory of the past 12 hours. (glossary) (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8050-6152-5
Page Count: 152
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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
PERSPECTIVES
An eighth grader discovers five schoolmates with psychic powers in this amateurish effort from Lubar. Martin, who was expelled from every other junior high in six counties for mouthing off, is consigned to prison-like Edgeview Alternative School, along with other violent or nerdy teens deemed hopeless misfits. While trying to avoid both the ready fists of hulking bully Lester Bloodbath and the shock therapy meted out by Principal Davis, he meets Torchy, who can start fires without matches or lighters, Cheater Woo, whose test answers are always identical to someone else’s, and several others with odd, unconscious talents. Interspersing Martin’s tediously self-analytical narrative with flat attempts at humor, trite student essays, repetitive memos to faculty, and mawkish letters from home, Lugar draws the tale to a paradoxical climax in which the self-styled “psi five” scuttle Bloodbath’s plot to close the school down, but then do their best to earn releases. After realizing that he is psychic, able to read people’s deepest fears and hopes, Martin abruptly acquires a sense of responsibility and resolves never to abuse his talent. Padded with aimless subplots and earnest efforts to drum up sympathy for the one-dimensional cast’s brutal bullies and ineffectual teachers, this contrived story is a weak alternative to Stephanie Tolan’s Welcome to the Ark (1996) or Willo Davis Roberts’s The Girl with the Silver Eyes (1980). (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86646-1
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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BOOK REVIEW
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