A swift, unwavering pace complements sublimely complex characters.
In Brown’s YA adventure, an accident turns an 18-year-old female member of a city’s elite team of protectors into a superhero.
Delilah Greyson is just one of five trainees remaining in the competition to join the Defenders. There’s only one open spot on the team, which protects the citizens of Charlotte. All of Delilah’s training pays off, and she becomes the newest member. Unfortunately, team leader Jake blames her for their failure to capture the Amphibian—a giant monster terrorizing Charlotte—and benches her for subsequent missions. While on probation, Delilah searches for an unfinished invention (courtesy of the team’s second-in-command and resident nerd, David), seemingly for revenge against Jake, who locked away the unstable machine in his office. Inadvertently turning on the machine, she survives an ensuing explosion and wakes up sporting feathers and birdlike powers (e.g., flight). Delilah, in disguise, takes on the city’s criminals, which may include Elemental, a masked female with fire-and-ice powers. Elemental’s objectives, however, are ambiguous: cops have tried to stop her from freezing a river, but she’s also saved people from the Amphibian. Delilah, working with the Defenders as the White Dove (and still largely unidentified), will have to identify the real villain(s). Brown’s tongue-in-cheek novel acknowledges its absurdity while instilling chic comic-book components. Delilah, for example, initially describes herself as “a giant bird lady” but, in confrontations with baddies, coolly pulls feathers out of her wrist to use as weapons. The theme of good vs. bad—and the shades in between—is strong throughout and leads to a twist or two involving a few characters. The plot, however, occasionally baffles; at least one character, for example, knows Elemental’s true identity and has no discernible reason for keeping that info from Delilah. Regardless, superpowers are smartly incorporated. Elemental’s hair and outfit colors depend on which power she’s using, while Delilah’s flight is freedom from her Defenders probation. At the same time, the powers aren’t superficial; fire and ice correlate with Elemental’s apparent bipolar personality.
A swift, unwavering pace complements sublimely complex characters.Pub Date: March 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4582-2010-3
Page Count: 188
Publisher: AbbottPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2017
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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