A bighearted and imaginative tale about a glam god’s fans.
Two teenagers find salvation in each other in this music-tinged YA sci-fi novel.
Teen Davi is struck by a girl he sees at a glam and glitter rock concert. She isn’t exactly beautiful, but there is something that draws him to her. When he sees her leaving the Angelus—the once-great hotel founded by his great-grandfather and where Davi and his sister still live—he follows her and eventually introduces himself. She is Anna Z., and she’s a girl of a million interests and theories. The two quickly bond over their love of glam god Django Conn, whom Anna sees as the next stage in human evolution: “We’re homo lux. Humans made out of light just like in the movies and the late show on TV. That’s Django—and that’s us too.” Anna opens Davi’s eyes to ideas that he’s never before considered. Davi thinks he’s found a new best friend even though he receives warnings that Anna is not what she appears to be. Nevertheless, he is strongly tempted to join Anna on a pilgrimage to follow Django’s tour across the continent and to discover the secret of “Alien Drift,” a mysterious force that might have great implications for the future of humanity. Watts (Stonecutter, 2006, etc.) writes in an inventive, energetic prose that synthesizes slang and youthful earnestness to capture the personality of narrator Davi: “One half of me was zapped by seeing this girl, like a knife juiced with electricity cutting into my brain. She was gone, vanished, disappeared inside herself.” The world of the novel, from its language and geography to its layers of popular culture, is drawn with intricacy and vitality. Some of the plot points may feel a bit contrived, but the colorful verisimilitude of Davi and his infatuation with Anna should propel readers forward. Django is perhaps a bit too obviously a David Bowie analog, but Watts successfully captures not only the gravity of a teenage subculture, but also the more mercurial feeling of an axial generation on the cusp of something completely new.
A bighearted and imaginative tale about a glam god’s fans.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-946154-15-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Meerkat Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
PERSPECTIVES
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
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