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
Inspiring and heartwarming.
The future is female: Her name is President Diffenderfer.
Best friends since kindergarten, Ava, CJ, Jordan, and Martha tackle their senior year with great aplomb in Watson’s debut. When their senior rite of passage, carving one’s name into the jungle gym at a local park, is threatened by a city council that wants to demolish the park, the girls rally to save the place where they became friends. This is far from their only problem: Though each is talented, they struggle this year with emotional, academic, social, and financial issues. Latinx artist Ava, who lives with depression, desires to find her birth mother and attend art school against her mother’s wishes; white cross-country athlete CJ, who is self-conscious about her body, can’t crack the SATs, so she strengthens her college application by volunteering with disabled children; biracial (black/white) student journalist Jordan lies about her age to interview a handsome councilman’s aide, and a mutual crush develops; STEM-focused white lesbian Martha, named for her ancestor Martha Washington, worries that her family can’t afford MIT. Over the course of the year, the friends weather obstacles and realize the power of their friendship. Their relationship prepares one of the girls to become president of the United States, and the twist ending will come as a surprise. The characters are superbly drawn; portrayed as whole people, the various elements of their identities are not the entirety of who they are.
Inspiring and heartwarming. (Fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: March 10, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-45483-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poppy/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
An overall entertaining read.
In this sequel to The Similars (2018), tensions rise as the villains reveal a ploy to exact revenge on the Ten and their families and ultimately take over the world.
When Emma Chance returns to her elite boarding school, Darkwood Academy, for her senior year, things are different: Her best friend, Ollie Ward, is back while Levi Gravelle, Ollie’s clone and Emma’s love interest, has been imprisoned on Castor Island. More importantly, Emma is coming to terms with the contents of a letter from Gravelle which states that she is Eden, a Similar created to replace the original Emma, who died as a child. To complicate matters further, other clones—who are not Similars—infiltrate Darkwood, and Emma and her friends uncover a plot that threatens not only the lives of everyone they care about, but also the world as they know it. Hanover wastes no time delving right into the action; readers unfamiliar with the first book may get lost. This duology closer is largely predictable and often filled with loopholes, but the fast-paced narrative and one unexpected plot twist make for an engaging ride. As before, most of the primary characters read as white, and supporting characters remain underdeveloped. Despite its flaws and often implausible turns of events, the novel calls attention to larger questions of identity, selfhood, and what it means to be human.
An overall entertaining read. (Dystopia. 13-16)Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4926-6513-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: Sept. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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