Sixteen-year-old foster child Lana Morris has a lot of wishes. She wants her conniving foster mother, Veronica, to treat her like a foster daughter rather than a housemaid and a threat. She’d like to be accepted by the local teens, have friends other than her special-needs foster brothers and sister, and to figure out her relationship with her foster father. In a cluttered antique shop with an aged proprietress, Lana finds a Ladies’ Drawing Kit containing 13 pink speckled sheets of paper and some charcoal pencils. When she draws, the first two sketches come true, and now all she has to decide is what to do with the remaining 11 wishes. Then she faces the threat of ejection from her foster home. Lana draws and contemplates her wishes against a background of subplots on the nature of romance, marriage and the need to belong. The small-town summer setting gives the work a feeling of a slow, almost magical unfolding of events. Each of these events is enthralling, leading to a tidy, upbeat ending. The peripheral characters are distinctive and in Veronica’s case, terrifying. A subtle yet complex, slightly surreal story about the power of wishing. (Fiction. YA)
Pub Date: May 8, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-375-83106-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
A heart-melting story of self-acceptance and self-actualization.
A 16-year-old Black Type A overachiever enlists the help of a free spirit to unlock a truer version of herself.
Audre is a budding therapist who’s dreaming of escaping Brooklyn to stay in Malibu Beach with her father for the summer—Dadifornia is the highlight of her year. Her close relationship with her mother (who first appeared in Williams’ 2021 novel for adults, Seven Days in June) is unraveling, and Audre feels displaced thanks to a new baby sister and stepfather and ongoing home renovations. But her summer plans implode when her father cancels her trip to California because his wife is having pregnancy complications. Forced to re-evaluate everything, Audre decides to write a teen self-help book to help her get into Stanford. When she struggles to come up with original ideas, her best friend, Reshma, tells anxious, awkward Audre that she needs to live a bit more. Reshma creates an Experience Challenge for Audre, and the girls agree that Bash Henry would be a perfect “fun consultant.” Recent Hillcrest Prep graduate Bash is a track star from California with dysfunctional parents (a white mother and Black father), who’s intrigued by the prospect of helping Audre. The teens’ mental health awareness is realistically portrayed, and their romance provides a nice counterbalance to the narrative’s more serious themes. Readers will resonate with the well-developed relationship dynamics among the central and peripheral characters.
A heart-melting story of self-acceptance and self-actualization. (Romance. 14-18)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780316511087
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A deftly balanced mix of history, intrigue, and romance.
Against the backdrop of World War II, four young women codebreakers put their minds together to find a serial killer.
It’s early 1943, and Arlington Hall, a one-time girls’ school in Virginia, is now the site of a covert intelligence facility where an 18-year-old former maid secretly assumes the new identity Kit Sutherland and becomes a codebreaker. A night out turns deadly when one of their own is murdered, and Kit stumbles across her body in the bathroom. Kit, roommate Dottie, and Moya, the supervisor of their floor, work alongside Violet, one of the Black girls from the segregated codebreaking unit, to bring the culprit to justice. As the budding friends turn their sharp minds and analytical abilities to covertly investigating what turns out to be a series of murders, Kit struggles to keep her own dangerous secret—and her attraction to Moya—under wraps. Meanwhile, Moya will do everything in her power to help her girls while trying not to fall in love with Kit. The novel deftly addresses questions of inequality across class, race, and sexuality in a story that combines well-researched historical background with a nifty whodunit, a strong focus on friendship, and an empowering queer romance. The narrative follows Kit and Moya, making them the better developed characters in the largely White cast. An author’s note includes many resources about the real women whose behind-the-scenes espionage work informed this story.
A deftly balanced mix of history, intrigue, and romance. (Historical thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-33958-2
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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