An often engaging depiction of characters from immigrant families that’s hampered by uneven execution.
In Krantz’s debut middle-grade tale, best friends face a moral quandary that threatens to destabilize their friendship.
In 1968, in New York City’s Little Italy neighborhood, 13-year-old Stella Bellarosa is overwhelmed by her large, overbearing family. Her parents are always fighting, her sister’s always grandstanding, and her grandparents are always hovering. She faces additional pressures at her Catholic school, and she dreams of winning a scholarship to a Catskills boarding school. However, Stella would only be happy there if her 13-year-old best friend, Pin Pin Yang, a child of Chinese immigrants, attends with her. The girls bond over their similar family dynamics. Pin Pin is worried about purchasing a suitably extravagant present for her baby sister, and her solution is to steal a wallet from one of the nuns—an idea that Stella feels is morally indefensible. Together, they try to slip it back into the nun’s purse, but they’re caught, and Stella takes the blame and the resulting suspension. She’s angry at Pin Pin and also worries about her own relationship with her mother and father and whether they “could stop fighting for once and love me enough to forgive me.” Pin Pin skips school with Stella and they have a grand day out in the city, which clarifies their deep bond. Krantz’s novel portrays immigrant communities of New York in compelling detail, and it effectively depicts the struggles of the girls, who have different personas in school and at home. However, although the book is billed as a middle-grade novel, the complexity of the language puts it firmly at a YA level; there’s also occasional vulgarity (“I’m gonna kick your ass”), and one character makes offensive remarks about Chinese people. A significant amount of Italian dialogue isn’t adequately translated, as well, and the author overuses italics in a way that’s distracting and disruptive.
An often engaging depiction of characters from immigrant families that’s hampered by uneven execution.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-615-90303-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: purple pie press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
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