A fast-paced story that portrays real events to which many teens can easily relate.
A Catholic teenager collides head-on with the doctrine of her youth.
Buckley’s first novel for young adults sets the charged issues of date rape and unwanted pregnancy up against the Catholic faith. Set in Denver, 15-year-old Kara MacNeill narrates the story of her sophomore year in high school, a trying time for most teens, which for Kara proves to hold as many dramatic peaks and valleys as the Rocky Mountains of her native Colorado. The only child of a strict, workaholic father and kind but actively pro-life mother, Kara’s intelligence, good looks and charm help her easily succeed at St. Ursula’s Academy for Girls. But Kara begins to find the confines of her childhood world–“All I ever got to do was go to church, school, or dumb sleepover parties”–a bit too restrictive the night Jake Dodson, the senior basketball star of Cherry Creek High, takes an interest in her. Petrified that her “drill sergeant” father will put the kibosh on her budding relationship, Kara starts to sneak out after curfew to be with Jake, who wastes no time introducing her to his partying crowd. Kara succumbs to peer pressure one raucous night and gets so drunk that, when Jake forces himself upon her, she cannot fend him off. While still reeling from the fact that her first boyfriend has raped her, Kara learns she’s pregnant. This discovery sends her into a free fall; her grades plummet as she questions whether to seek an abortion in a state that requires parental consent, which means Kara will have to tell her conservative parents and risk incurring their–not to mention God’s–wrath. The crux of the story centers on this dilemma and the options open to a teen who feels that she has none. Catholics will find the novel’s resolution as wildly controversial as the subjects it explores, but one suspects that is Buckley’s point.
A fast-paced story that portrays real events to which many teens can easily relate.Pub Date: April 26, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-595-40926-6
Page Count: 167
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2011
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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