Appealing if familiar fantasy elements are well-handled in this debut.
After her mother’s death, a girl who can see in the dark tries to restart a normal high school life but keeps encountering the mysterious in Bennett’s YA fantasy.
Ten months ago, Tru Parker watched as a hit-and-run driver struck and killed her mother. She walked around in a virtual coma through the rest of her school year, and now that she’s a junior, she hopes to salvage her zombie reputation. Her best friend will help, as will her improved looks: she’s acquired a tan and extra inches in height, plus—silver lining—she lost her appetite after her mother’s death. Intriguing boyfriend opportunities present themselves: Isaac Efoti, a handsome and towering Tongan-Taiwanese, and Zander Hughes, a good-looking new student who seems strangely familiar. As Tru deals with high school issues—teachers, friends and enemies, homecoming, romance—she also shrugs off her disturbing dreams and odd experiences. These include a warm humming sensation when she touches Zander; being able to heal injuries, even a grieving student’s depression, with her touch; strange comments from others, like how Dante (another new student) calls her an “‘Idimmu’” and says he’ll keep her secret. Isaac and Phoebe, his sister, also seem to have secrets, as do Zander and his brother Peter. When Tru is kidnapped by a half-insane minion of the powerful Collector, she gains new courage and learns many startling truths about supernatural beings and her relationship to them, vowing to discover more. Though Bennett, in her debut novel, travels familiar territory here—“ordinary” but actually gorgeous teenager with special powers; werewolves and vampires; a special destiny—she lifts her story with strong writing and a good voice. Tru and her friends sound like high schoolers; they use inventive slang (“Son of a butcher,” says her best friend Ruthie, a vegetarian) and experience a good balance of concerns both frivolous and serious. Readers may feel a little overwhelmed, though, by the ending revelations, which come at a fast clip and involve much strange vocabulary like Usemi, Akharu, and Sethians. The story leaves many loose ends, no doubt to be picked up in planned sequels.
Appealing if familiar fantasy elements are well-handled in this debut.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2014
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 181
Publisher: What If Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 6, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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