Like Derrick, this series is off to a promising high school career.
A kid who’s got the moves needs the smarts to go with them.
Derrick may be just 15 and only entering high school, but Division I and even NBA dreams are not unrealistic—but first he has to make the starting squad at Marion East, the mostly black high school in his inner-city Indianapolis neighborhood. This means impressing the coach that his uncle blames for scotching his own NBA dreams years earlier. Readers won’t be as surprised as Derrick is when he is not automatically named to the starting five or when the coach insists that he stop relying on his dunk and practice shooting from a distance—and start learning how to be part of a team. Resentful, Derrick considers transferring to snooty Hamilton Academy, where he’s being energetically recruited and where his underemployed father has been promised a full-time custodian job. Waltman’s series opener (first of a planned four) features plenty of basketball action fueled by hoops slang that will set basketball-mad readers right onto the court. Derrick’s easy, colloquial narration occasionally leaves the court for scenes at home, where his parents struggle to make ends meet, and in school, where he cluelessly woos the beautiful Jasmine. Waltman’s lovingly sketched Indianapolis lends the tale further authenticity. The author avoids slam-dunk answers, leaving readers poised for the next book.
Like Derrick, this series is off to a promising high school career. (Fiction. 12-18)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-935955-64-1
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Cinco Puntos Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
In a morality tale with all the breeziness and exaggeration of a teen movie, an eighth-grade mean girl loses her status and becomes only slightly less mean.
The lead in the school musical and the host of an advice segment on the school's TV channel, Kacey Simon starts at the top. Then a failure to care for her new purple contacts and a fall at her friend Molly's boy-girl birthday party doom Kacey to the ultimate in loser accessories: glasses and braces. Saddled with a braces-related speech impediment along with her geeky new look, Kacey finds herself at the bottom of the pecking order. Molly and other former friends circulate a YouTube video mocking Kacey's lisp, and, somewhat unrealistically, the drama teacher immediately removes her from the school play. Luckily (and, one might argue, undeservedly), two outcasts support the fallen queen of mean. Paige, a student-government enthusiast, helps Kacey with a plan to regain her popularity. Zander, an indie rocker who wears, to Kacey's horror, skinny jeans, grudgingly accepts Kacey as his band's lead singer. Despite the book's ostensible stance against meanness, Kacey regains her social standing largely by bullying and manipulating her old friends, and the notion that glasses and braces must always spell social ruin is left unquestioned.
Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-316-06825-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Poppy/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2011
A plucky orphan runs away to join an intergalactic circus in this frenetic science-fiction/adventure tale.
After bullies at the Bleeker Academy for Girls prevent her from attending a gymnastics competition—and thus becoming an astronaut—and a mysterious man visits her in the middle of the night, 15-year-old Beatrix Ling finds refuge with a space-faring circus. The performers aboard the Big Top are all Tinker-touched, spreading diversity and color where the descendants of the Mandate leave conformity and order. Trix’s suddenly pink hair helps her fit in, but she seems to lack superpowers like her classmates’. Trying to juggle homework—because even spaceships have school—the social scene and her budding affection for the enigmatic Ringmaster, Trix must also protect her parents’ special rock and outrun the villainous Nyl, an agent of the Mandate. The razzle-dazzle of circus life in outer space and the constant action offer plenty of distraction from the sometimes contrived plot, abundant similes and occasionally melodramatic dialogue. Fagan’s (The Magical Misadventures of Prunella Bogthistle, 2010) vibrant and tactile descriptions make for a cinematic read, and certain elements are reminiscent of such fantasy and science-fiction mainstays as Doctor Who, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Harry Potter.
A book that reaches for the stars and provides a thrilling ride. (Science fiction. 12 & up)
Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-58136-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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