An appealing plot isn’t enough to support thinly drawn characters.
An ex–beauty queen, along with her teenage daughter, leaves a hardscrabble life in Oregon for Los Angeles, where she hopes to become a psychic to the stars.
Debbie Allen, a former Miss America contender, and her 17-year-old daughter, Lindsey, scrape by with waitressing and the psychic-reading business they conduct in their garage. Lindsey can read tea leaves and tarot cards and is in on the con, but she would rather devote her energies to school and winning a scholarship to study astronomy in college. But Debbie, equal parts blindly optimistic and perpetually dissatisfied, has other plans: After a mysterious fire burns down their house, they drive to LA, where they can live the life Debbie has always dreamed of. Settled in at the Sepulveda Apartment Complex, with an up-close view of the 405 freeway, Lindsey is soon enrolled as a scholarship student at a Christian school, the same one Paco, her hunky neighbor, attends. At school, Lindsey is mentored by her scholarship benefactor, Joan Fields, a lonely widow whom Debbie marks as their ticket to the good life. Debbie and Lindsey ingratiate themselves with Joan, so when a storm makes their apartment soggy and destroys Joan’s Malibu estate, the three end up living together in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. This is only the beginning for Debbie, who plans to hold a séance for Joan’s dead husband while fleecing the widow of her considerable savings. Meanwhile, Lindsey is trying to fit in at school and plan for college while conducting an implausibly chaste romance with Paco. Though the novel has some light, sweet moments, the characters feel underdeveloped; while Lindsey and Debbie are essentially small-time grifters (though there's none of the excitement of that kind of novel here), there's little exploration of their inner lives.
An appealing plot isn’t enough to support thinly drawn characters.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62914-751-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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