A good resource for teens who don’t want to use adult cookbooks. (Nonfiction. 12-18)
This by-teens, for-teens cookbook focuses on specific ways teens can live a healthy, environmentally conscious life without sacrificing the food they love.
Early chapters define and present six green ideas. These include eating healthfully, seasonally, locally and organically, as well as vegetarianism and fair trade. The evenhanded presentation focuses on how these ways of eating can benefit both the individual as well as the entire planet. The recipes that follow are simple and utilize easily found ingredients. A photo and a quote from the contributing teen as well as its seasonality precede each recipe. Recipes for such favorites as homemade chocolate-hazelnut spread, vegetable smoothies and Oreo cupcakes are inexpensive and produce dishes that are portable and friendly to the teen palate. Sections feature snacks, DIY kitchen staples, entrées, desserts and more. Quick tips as well as ways in which a recipe might be altered for variety accompany many of the recipes. Cleanly laid out with photos of the teen contributors and the dishes themselves, this introduction to green eating is informative without being preachy. However, other than the fact that it is by teens, this resource fails to differentiate itself from the many other green cookbooks on the market.
A good resource for teens who don’t want to use adult cookbooks. (Nonfiction. 12-18)Pub Date: July 29, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-936976-58-4
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Zest Books
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2014
This is clearly not unbiased reporting, but it makes a strong case that justice in our legal system does not always fit the...
Porinchak recounts how the legal system fails five teens who commit a serious crime.
The May 22, 1995, brawl in a white suburb of Los Angeles that resulted in the death of one teen and the injury of another is related matter-of-factly. The account of the police investigation, the judicial process, and the ultimate incarceration of the five boys is more passionately argued. Since the story focuses on the teens’ experiences following the brawl, minimal attention is given to Jimmy Farris, who died, although the testimony of Mike McLoren, who survived, is crucial. The book opens with a comprehensive dramatis personae that will help orient readers, and the text is liberally punctuated by quotes drawn from contemporary newspaper and magazine coverage as well as interviews with several of the key figures, including three of the accused. Porinchak argues that the proceedings were influenced by the high-profile 1994 trial and acquittal of the Menendez brothers, and unfounded accusations of gang involvement further clouded the matter. Despite the journalistic style, there is clear intent to elicit sympathy for the five boys involved, three of whom were sentenced to life without parole; of two, the text remarks that “they were numbers now, not humans.”
This is clearly not unbiased reporting, but it makes a strong case that justice in our legal system does not always fit the crime. (Nonfiction. 14-18)Pub Date: May 2, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4814-8132-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2017
A visceral window into a survivor’s childhood and a testament to the enduring influence of unconditional love.
As palliative for his beloved Abuela's worsening dementia, memoirist Ogle offers her a book of childhood recollections.
Cast in episodic rushes of free verse and paralleling events chronicled in Free Lunch (2019) and Punching Bag (2021), the poems take the author from age 4 until college in a mix of love notes to his devoted, hardworking, Mexican grandmother; gnawing memories of fights and racial and homophobic taunts at school as he gradually becomes aware of his sexuality; and bitter clashes with both his mother, described as a harsh, self-centered deadbeat with seemingly not one ounce of love to give or any other redeeming feature, and the distant White father who threw him out the instant he came out. Though overall the poems are less about the author’s grandmother than about his own angst and issues (with searing blasts of enmity reserved for his birthparents), a picture of a loving intergenerational relationship emerges, offering moments of shared times and supportive exchanges amid the raw tallies of beat downs at home, sudden moves to escape creditors, and screaming quarrels. “My memories of a wonderful woman are written in words and verses and fragments in this book,” he writes in a foreword, “unable to be unwritten. And if it is forgotten, it can always be read again.”
A visceral window into a survivor’s childhood and a testament to the enduring influence of unconditional love. (Verse memoir. 13-18)Pub Date: Sept. 6, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-324-01995-4
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Norton Young Readers
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
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