Jayd is wearing white in honor of her marriage to her spiritual mother Oshune, but, as she observes in her introductory...
In the 14th volume of Divine's wildly popular Drama High series, newly initiated voodoo priestess Jayd Jackson begins her senior year.
Jayd is wearing white in honor of her marriage to her spiritual mother Oshune, but, as she observes in her introductory journal entry, her mind is as much on the mundane as on the divine. An incriminating cell phone picture suggests her boyfriend Jeremy is cheating, and Jayd avoids and fights with Jeremy and swaps choice words with “that broad.” Her friends Mickey, Rah and Nigel, along with the two young children in their care, move in together (“I know it's strange for some of my friends to be parents going into our senior year of high school,” Jayd opines in a refreshingly nonjudgmental aside, “but that's how it is sometimes”), and Jayd is the first to hear when money troubles arise and treacherous exes show up. In the meantime, Jayd's archnemesis Misty is becoming a vampire, a turn of events the author weaves comfortably into the book's voodoo cosmology, and Jayd fights Misty and her kin both in dreams and in the physical world.Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7582-3119-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dafina/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasant romance hindered by some curious choices.
Opposites attract after tragedy strikes.
Autistic white teen David Drucker spends every lunch period eating alone. When Indian-American popular girl Kit Lowell joins him one day she’s just looking for a quiet place to sit. It’s been one month since Kit’s father, a white dentist, died in a terrible car accident, but Kit is still flailing. As the two teens get to know one another and eat lunch together each day, they find themselves bringing out their own best qualities. Slowly but surely, romance blooms. There’s a warmth and ease to their relationship that the author captures effortlessly. Each chapter alternates perspective between Kit and David, and each one is fully rendered. The supporting characters are less well served, particularly Kit’s first-generation-immigrant mother. There are two major complications in Kit’s story, both involving her workaholic mother, and the lack of development defuses some potential fireworks. The central relationship is so charming and engaging that readers will tolerate the adequate tertiary characters. Less tolerable is a late-in-the-game reveal about Dr. Lowell’s accident that shifts the novel’s tone to a down note that juxtaposes poorly with everything that came before. The author pulls out in the final few pages, but it still leaves a sour taste in the mouth.
A pleasant romance hindered by some curious choices. (Romance. 12-16)Pub Date: July 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-553-53568-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: June 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
An enjoyable, if predictable, romantic holiday story.
Is an exuberant extended family the cure for a breakup? Sophie is about to find out.
When Sophie unexpectedly breaks up with her boyfriend, she isn’t thrilled about spending the holidays at her grandparents’ house instead of with him. And when her grandmother forms a plan to distract Sophie from her broken heart—10 blind dates, each set up by different family members—she’s even less thrilled. Everyone gets involved with the matchmaking, even forming a betting pool on the success of each date. But will Sophie really find someone to fill the space left by her ex? Will her ex get wind of Sophie’s dating spree via social media and want them to get back together? Is that what she even wants anymore? This is a fun story of finding love, getting to know yourself, and getting to know your family. The pace is quick and light, though the characters are fairly shallow and occasionally feel interchangeable, especially with so many names involved. A Christmas tale, the plot is a fast-paced series of dinners, parties, and games, relayed in both narrative form and via texts, though the humor occasionally feels stiff and overwrought. The ending is satisfying, though largely unsurprising. Most characters default to white as members of Sophie’s Italian American extended family, although one of her cousins has a Filipina mother. One uncle is gay.
An enjoyable, if predictable, romantic holiday story. (Fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-368-02749-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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