An honest look at the struggles many young people face at home and at school.
A middle schooler experiences the transformative power of writing.
Life holds little promise for Dragon. At school, he struggles to keep up. Home isn’t much better. His mother’s diabetes prevents her from working, so there’s hardly anything to eat and their trailer smells like her cigarettes. Worst of all, the events of one terrifying night have left Dragon wounded, raw, and easily triggered. But seventh grade changes everything; several caring adults support him by giving him the tools and space to process his emotions, and he learns he’s not the only kid with dyslexia in his class. Best of all, he finds his writing voice along with the courage to tell his story. Thoughtful pacing provides a foundation for Dragon’s first-person narration, punctuated by short free-verse poems about his hopes and fears. Dragon’s transformation from fly-under-the-radar, struggling student to brave friend and writer is gradual and satisfying, making up for the sudden, less realistic turnabout of his mother from depressed and unresponsive to conscientious and supportive. Dragon’s classmates, though sketchily drawn, are a well-intentioned, ultimately kind group. This story with curricular applications will be a mirror for kids with similar adverse childhood experiences including abuse and abandonment and a reminder to educators that they have great transformative powers. Whiteness is the default for most characters; Dragon’s mostly nonverbal half sister’s father was Latinx.
An honest look at the struggles many young people face at home and at school. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-945419-22-2
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Fawkes Press
Review Posted Online: Oct. 12, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
Not for the faint of heart or stomach (or maybe of any parts) but sure to be appreciated by middle school zombie cognoscenti.
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle meets Left for Dead/The Walking Dead/Shaun of the Dead in a high-energy, high-humor look at the zombie apocalypse, complete with baseball (rather than cricket) bats.
The wholesome-seeming Iowa cornfields are a perfect setting for the emergence of ghastly anomalies: flesh-eating cows and baseball-coach zombies. The narrator hero, Rabi (for Rabindranath), and his youth baseball teammates and friends, Miguel and Joe, discover by chance that all is not well with their small town’s principal industry: the Milrow corporation’s giant feedlot and meat-production and -packing facility. The ponds of cow poo and crammed quarters for the animals are described in gaggingly smelly detail, and the bone-breaking, bloody, flesh-smashing encounters with the zombies have a high gross-out factor. The zombie cows and zombie humans who emerge from the muck are apparently a product of the food supply gone cuckoo in service of big-money profits with little concern for the end result. It’s up to Rabi and his pals to try to prove what’s going on—and to survive the corporation’s efforts to silence them. Much as Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (2010) was a clarion call to action against climate change, here’s a signal alert to young teens to think about what they eat, while the considerable appeal of the characters and plot defies any preachiness.
Not for the faint of heart or stomach (or maybe of any parts) but sure to be appreciated by middle school zombie cognoscenti. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-22078-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
An outstanding addition to the inadequate-parent genre.
For 12-year-old, “fifty percent Swedish, twenty-five percent Haitian, twenty-five percent French” Felix, all of his scary stories are about the Ministry of Children and Family Development—the Canadian agency that has the power to take him from his mom and place him in foster care.
His flighty mother, Astrid (she’s the Swedish part), is both depressed and chronically under- or often unemployed. His father is mostly out of the picture. Astrid will do what she needs to, including artfully lying and stealing, to keep their heads—barely—above water as they descend into homelessness. As depicted with gritty realism, the pair has been living in a van for months, using public restrooms, and rarely having enough to eat. But Felix has two great friends, Winnie, who is Asian, and Dylan, who is white; they will watch his back whatever comes. Sadly, they have little idea of his truly dire situation since he’s so resourceful at hiding his problems in order to stave off the MCFD. When Felix is selected to appear on a quiz show, it seems as if it could offer a resolution for their troubles: Winning would earn him a $25,000 prize. Felix’s deeply engrossing and fully immersive first-person narrative of homelessness is both illuminating and heartbreaking. Although the story ends with hope for the future, it’s his winsome and affecting determination that will win readers over.
An outstanding addition to the inadequate-parent genre. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-6834-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Wendy Lamb/Random
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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