The Internet acts as a teen’s saving grace in this angst-y but sweet YA novel.
Jane Shilling is a sullen teenage girl with an alcoholic father and no friends; but on the Internet, nobody knows that. Told exclusively through online sources—from digital journals to inboxes and instant messages—this is the story of Jane’s living more than one life. She’s created multiple personalities for herself, including the popular Rachel, a 20-something woman with a perfect family and happy life. While Jane would be content to spend her days as Rachel, writing fan fiction for a beloved sci-fi show and interacting with other sci-fi fans online, the adults in her life would like to pull her back to reality. Ever since Jane’s mother died, her therapist has been hounding her to open up, and a new math teacher harasses her for missed assignments. A school bully targets her online quirks, but Gary, a skee-ball champion and student at Jane’s school, befriends Jane both on and off the screen. He may be one of the only people Jane can open up to, along with Nora Acton, a new therapist who’s resourceful enough to chat with Jane online during their sessions. When Jane’s online personas begin to fall apart, she’ll need the help of Gary and Nora to speak her truth. This Internet narrative is surprisingly compelling and effective. Readers gain a portrait of Jane’s deceased mother in a short series of emails sent before her death; it’s a simple reply chain among Jane, her mother and her then-sober father about what to make for dinner than night, but it speaks volumes about why Jane’s life is so wrecked in the wake of her mother’s death. The sci-fi fan fiction is a bit hard to contend with, but it also works as a means to show Jane’s dissociation from the pain in her life. Readers should be prepared for total chat-speak immersion, from actions expressed between double colons to Gary’s abbreviation-happy communiqués. Throughout it all, though, Jane is a dynamic heroine, smart, angry and heartwarming in all the right ways. An IM straight to the heart of teenagers who love texting more than talking.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2013
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Lemon Sherbet Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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