An understated, grounded account of getting older.
Capetanos’ debut middle-grade novel describes a year in the life of a 12-year-old boy as he grapples with the big questions of life.
Thomas “Tommy” Adkins Johnson is an ordinary preteen growing up in central North Carolina: “Almost everything about me seems average,” he narrates. His best friend is Kareem Brooks, but the two have drifted apart since Kareem has become more serious about playing basketball. Tommy also has a good friend, Mignon Eubanks, who’s not quite a girlfriend—at least not yet. At the beginning of his seventh-grade school year, his class takes a field trip to a planetarium, and learning about the vastness of space changes his outlook on life. He puzzles over tough questions, such as whether humans are alone in the universe. Did someone make us, he wonders, or are we just an accident? When Tommy’s uncle, Aaron, is killed in a motorcycle accident, he starts pondering death by reading obituaries and visiting graveyards. He decides that he wants to leave something behind when he passes away, so that people will know who he was. Mignon comes up with the idea of making a time capsule, which Tommy calls the “Time Box.” The process of constructing the box, deciding what to put in it, and figuring out where to bury it shapes the rest of his year. Capetanos depicts Tommy often contemplating the mysteries of girls and sex in this novel, sometimes crudely, as many adolescent boys do. However, the author also portrays his protagonist’s budding relationship with Mignon in a way that conveys mutual respect and genuine feeling, as she teaches him how to slow-dance and gives him his “first real genuine kiss.” Tommy tells his story as if talking to someone who’s unfamiliar with his 21st-century suburban world—a future archaeologist unearthing a time capsule, perhaps. Sometimes he comes across as too insightful for his age, but more often his 12-year-old voice sounds genuine. Due to some strong language, this realistic coming-of-age story will appeal to more mature preteen readers as well as adults who may be feeling nostalgic for their childhoods.
An understated, grounded account of getting older.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9911211-8-2
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Owl Canyon Press
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An enjoyable, eloquently told tale.
Sutherland’s (Windsong, 2008) contemporary novel takes readers to the small, fictional Australian town of Trundle, offering a peek at the lives of its residents over the course of a year.
Grown sisters Ronnie and Marie have returned to their family home in Trundle, each of them recovering from a personal heartbreak. They’re not sure what to make of their troublesome neighbors, the Lals, who have built a large, modern house next door. The sisters and the Lals are at the core of the story, but Sutherland expertly weaves the lives of various residents into a rich tapestry. Trundle possesses many elements found in any small town: mom-and-pop shops, a struggling economy and a colorful cast of characters. What sets it apart from other towns is a place called Pelican, a commune founded in the 1980s on the outskirts of town. Marie, a former resident who left Pelican under a cloud of disgrace, returns to find she is welcome in the community; burned out from work, Ronnie finds herself restored by her stay there. Meanwhile, the grieving Mr. Lal sees Pelican as the perfect spot to build his own version of the Taj Mahal in tribute to his deceased wife, and his son, Vijay, struggles to find himself and the meaning of life. The story shifts perspective, often jumping among the central protagonists and various Trundle figures, giving readers an intimate view of the town. But well-defined, realistically drawn characters enable readers to easily follow these shifts in perspective. In spite of occasional scandals and disturbing events, Sutherland’s novel is, at heart, a quiet story of ordinary people dealing with everyday problems. Her graceful descriptions—“Through the open window flowed a deep and restful stillness punctuated by the chime of birds and the tolling of frogs”—bring to life both the landscape and the people who inhabit it.
An enjoyable, eloquently told tale.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-1426904394
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Provides the type of engrossing hodgepodge of memoir, philosophy, literary theory and metaphysics growing more...
What if reams of our conventional knowledge are just flat-out wrong—what if, for instance, the division between “perceiver” and “perceived” is erroneous?
Peace theorizes about the nature of human existence and how we interact with our environment. Offering argument as well as description, Peace posits that the prevailing mode of seeing the self as “separate” from what it seen, as well as from others, is unproductive and wrongheaded. Touching on his work with the disabled, he recounts his own life experience, mixing personal anecdotes with excerpts from the writings of American poets Walt Whitman, Wallace Stevens, e. e. cummings and Emily Dickinson, as well as the British poets T. S. Eliot and John Keats. The poets serve as de facto guides through this book, as Peace looks to them to provide examples of the kind of consciousness he means to exalt: one where a sense of the self as an entity divorced from the rest of reality is overcome. The effects of this practice, Peace states, will benefit not just humankind, but the entire earth. His scope ranges from the perspective of the individual to the universe itself. At points, his reasoning becomes lost in insufficiently defined terminology or in the abstract nature of its own ideas. Sometimes, it’s unclear whose ideas are whose: “Without consciousness, there is no ‘time’ ” is essentially a paraphrase of Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Likewise, Peace’s discussions of perception in relation to the self might have benefited from an examination of the philosophical literature around that topic. There are platitudes, but there are also real insights, as well as a tone that indicates a passionate but tempered candidness. Though the collection as a whole seems elliptical, and at times repetitive, it’s by and large an intelligent project that aims to explore its subject matter outside of the confines of genre boundaries. It is at once an original statement and a bibliography of sources for further reading. Peace’s treatise, with its aggressive tone and pace, will not be for everyone. But this may be a strength, not a limitation.
Provides the type of engrossing hodgepodge of memoir, philosophy, literary theory and metaphysics growing more endangered—and perhaps more valuable—in book culture every day.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 391
Publisher: Dog Ear Publisher
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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