Easy to read and strong on sibling devotion, with frustratingly mixed messages about personal responsibility.
A boy works desperately to keep his sick little brother safe.
Twelve-year-old Timothy has a probation officer, a court-appointed psychologist, and a yearlong sentence of house arrest. He also has a 9-month-old brother who breathes through a trach tube that frequently clogs. Heavy oxygen tanks and a suction machine as loud as a jackhammer are their everyday equipment. Timothy’s crime: charging $1,445 on a stolen credit card for a month of baby Levi’s medicine, which his mother can’t afford, especially since his father left. The text shows illness, poverty, and hunger to be awful but barely acknowledges the role of, for example, weak health insurance, odd considering the nature of Timothy’s crime. The family has nursing help but not 24/7; the real house arrest in Timothy’s life isn’t a legal pronouncement, it’s the need to keep Levi breathing. Sometimes Timothy’s the only person home to do so. His court sentence requires keeping a journal; the premise that Holt’s straightforward free-verse poems are Timothy’s writing works well enough, though sometimes the verses read like immediate thoughts rather than post-event reflection. A sudden crisis at the climax forces Timothy into criminal action to save Levi’s life, but literally saving his brother from death doesn’t erase the whiff of textual indictment for lawbreaking. Even Mom equivocates, which readers may find grievously unjust.
Easy to read and strong on sibling devotion, with frustratingly mixed messages about personal responsibility. (Verse fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4521-3477-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This enthusiastic but clichéd series opener strings trope after trope on a thread of purple prose. On their 13th birthday, Diello and Cynthe impatiently await the manifestation of their magical gifts. These twins are Faelin, which means half Fae (on Mamee’s side) and half human (on Pa’s), and they have “coppery, green-flecked eyes” (natch). On an errand, the twins face not just the usual Faelin-hating prejudice but real danger; then they meet a talking golden wolf and return home to find their parents murdered, the farm sacked and old family secrets emerging. A hidden (and broken) sword, a gift of Sight, an endangered younger sister and a beckoning quest complete the picture. Earthy farm details (“We needed the rain, but it hit too hard. Mind that you lift the seedlings off the mud”) mix awkwardly with the glistening stuff of Fae (“When [Mamee] was very happy, she sometimes let her glamour appear, turning her into a glittering creature of silvery sparkles, her skin like snow, her lashes like tiny crystals”). The author tries to paint a unique world with slight alterations of recognizable English words (trees are “walner,” “chesternut” and “willuth”), but the exposition is clumsy, and momentum is weakened by overexplanation (“Amalina screamed. A cry of sheer terror”). It's not subtle, but it will carry along some readers on the prose’s pure eagerness. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7614-5828-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
In this crackerjack adventure, a pair of Cockney trash-pickers and their spaceman friend seek a MacGuffin in the ruins of post-apocalyptic London.
Fifteen-year-old Cass and her kid brother Wilbur are usually stuck scavving under a gangmaster's careful eye, pulling London to pieces and tossing it in crusher chutes. The Vlads have been running Britain ever since they conquered the world 100 years ago, and heaven help any Londoner who sneaks out of her lifelong job of searching for object of the Vlads’ desire: the artifact. Nobody knows what the artifact is, but Wilbur, convinced his comic books tell him how to find it, sneaks off repeatedly into forbidden neighborhoods. This is how he finds Peyto and Erin, strange kids who say the artifact is a flinder, and they need it to repair their wounded spaceship. Maybe Wilbur can help them—maybe he's even destined to. Now they're caught in a mad spiral of (occasionally incoherent) adventure, hopping into space and back, fleeing from Vlads, hiding in the British Museum, fighting drone soldiers in powered battlesuits. Cass has a lovely, rich narrative voice ("We go through it like a horse ’n’ cart through a cake"), and is a feisty heroine, a much better protagonist than destined savior Wilbur would have been. Even if events don't always quite hold together, it’s such a racketing good time it doesn't matter. (Science fiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-545-31767-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Chicken House/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 9, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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