A clever, well-crafted tale about parents and children.
A YA novel tells the story of a home-schooled teenager’s attempts to fit into the mainstream.
Fifteen-year-old Silver Abelli has been brought up to have “an authentic experience”: she is home-schooled by her ex–punk musician mother, Nicola, and works at the family bakery alongside her tradition-minded grandfather. But when her mother undergoes surgery for a brain tumor, Silver must live with Renz, her acerbic, podcast-hosting dad. She has reservations about the upheaval but hopes that it might mean she can finally attend high school like a regular American teen: dress in the latest fashions, ogle the clean-cut football players, and try out for the cheerleading team (“As thrilling as this fantasy was, it made her feel bad. Her parents would feel betrayed, she knew”). With her boy-crazy cousin Natalie, Silver pines after local hunk Jake Sullivan. After a chance encounter at a party, Jake and Silver start talking and eventually dating. Things are finally on the right track for Silver, if only her parents would cooperate. But her mother and father’s still-rocky relationship—along with some unsavory characters from the past that her dad refuses to let go of—will conspire to destabilize the life that Silver is desperately trying to build. Wittmann (Remember Big, 2013, etc.) writes in a sharp, funny prose that perfectly captures the angst and humiliation that define Silver’s usual state. The author skewers the myopia of Gen Xers still so busy railing against the man that they haven’t noticed that they’ve reached middle age and have parental responsibilities. Silver’s concerns as a contemporary teen are documented with equally observant details. At one point, standing before the burned shell of an old punk club, her father bemoans: “It was the place where we all came together, talking, laughing, playing our music, creating. What is going to be your touchstone? A fucking screen? I pity you. I really do.” With pragmatic humor, Wittmann notes that “Silver just kept texting back and forth with Natalie. She didn’t need his pity.” Like every generation before her, Silver navigates the treacherous waters of adolescence with the peculiar tools of her time.
A clever, well-crafted tale about parents and children.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 242
Publisher: Sara Camilli Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 21, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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