by Kate Castle ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 19, 2021
A tense page-turner that shows adolescent humanity at its best and worst.
Awards & Accolades
Our Verdict
GET IT
Marooned on a desert island, six high school girls must survive the elements and one another in this debut novel by Castle.
In 1993, 17-year-old Ellery Holmes is a talented heptathlete, starting as a scholarship student at Kings’ Academy, a top English private school. She’ll be meeting some of her new classmates (five girls, two boys) for the first time on a school trip to the Maldives. Ellery is something of a loner—a trait that’s exacerbated by the recent death of her father. She makes a new friend in the brainy, bullied Dawkes, but the rest of the rich, spoiled group offer little hope of acceptance. Petty jealousies and spite, Ellery can handle, but then the group’s plane goes down and they wash up on an uninhabited island. The pilot is dead, the group’s teacher is badly injured, and the two boys swim off alone to a neighboring island. Ellery and Dawkes are left trying to cooperate with alpha mean girl Whitney and her fellow “Cronies.” Further complicating matters is the fact that the remaining member of the group, Skye, is Ellery’s former best friend, whom she hasn’t spoken to since they kissed two years ago. Castle writes from Ellery’s first-person point of view and intersperses occasional diary entries by Dawkes throughout the narrative. The prose is crisp and effective, and the dialogue feels naturalistic. Castle’s story explores what humans are capable of when far from civilization, unambiguously following in the footsteps of William Golding’s classic novel Lord of the Flies1954), which it name checks. The main difference is that Castle’s castaways are mostly female. The stage is thus set for an exploration of the teenage group’s strengths (levelheadedness, adaptable intelligence, a willingness to cooperate) and weaknesses (posturing and a toxic adherence to social hierarchies). One can argue that the negative characteristics are attached too tightly to the Cronies, which makes them rather grueling characters; it also lessens the impact of their descent into evil. Nonetheless, the other players’ plights demand resolution and will keep readers on tenterhooks.
A tense page-turner that shows adolescent humanity at its best and worst.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-916903-13-5
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Dark Horse Publishing LLP
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Share your opinion of this book
More by Kate Castle
BOOK REVIEW
by Kate Castle
by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
39
Our Verdict
GET IT
New York Times Bestseller
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
Share your opinion of this book
More by Kristin Hannah
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Awards & Accolades
Likes
33
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
National Book Award Finalist
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
Share your opinion of this book
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.