An inventive, exciting, funny ride with surprising emotional resonance–a bloody good time.
High school drama, heartbreak and zombies.
Schloegel’s meta-novel features lovelorn teens battling a zombie invasion, but the real emotional stakes are found in the interstitial blog entries of “plain/unusual” protagonist Eleanor Armstrong–a fiercely intelligent, alienated high school student working out her issues through writing about the undead and other horrors of secondary education. The superpowers referenced in the title refer to the beauty and popularity of Eleanor’s protagonist and stand-in, Sarah, a plucky “pop girl” with a smart mouth pitched somewhere between Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Juno. Sarah negotiates her friendship with social pariah Marky and crush on popular boy Brandon while repelling zombies with admirable aplomb, but Eleanor has serious trouble with her relationships, including a strained detente with her emotionally reserved FBI agent father, a new wrinkle in her cozy bond with a nerdy friend and a disturbing discovery about her younger brother that leads Eleanor, most improbably, to an interest in weight lifting and the discovery of her unexpected superpowers. The zombie sections of the narrative are funny and scary in the best zombie-apocalypse tradition, and the revelations about Eleanor’s life in her blog posts deftly contextualize the action of her novel and deepen the emotional impact of both stories. The back-and-forth banter between Eleanor and Marky reads as authentic and smart teenspeak, and Schloegel convincingly conveys the desperation, loneliness and, above all, boredom of adolescence–a boredom that drives students to prey upon each other like the reanimated corpses that menace Sarah and Brandon. Eleanor has an instantly believable and engaging voice, a bracing moral intelligence, generosity of spirit and her novel is a hoot.
An inventive, exciting, funny ride with surprising emotional resonance–a bloody good time.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-1439249758
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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