A well-meaning effort that squanders a chance to tell a cohesive story about an ebbing youth culture.
Waite’s debut YA novel tells the story of teenage girl embarking on an unforgettable road trip during the tumultuous summer of 1978.
Lilly, the story’s 15-year-old narrator, desperately wants to leave her Boston home—at least for the summer. She’s eager to take part in the sex, drug and rock-music explosion happening all around her. At home, her high-achieving older sister is struggling with anorexia and a recent hospitalization, her mother is distracted and exhausted, and her father is antagonistic and remote. Small wonder that within minutes of meeting Joey, a handsome, joint-smoking 17-year-old with bushy hair who calls her “sexy girl,” she’s ready to follow him anywhere. That includes a local party, where she takes LSD and thinks she loses her virginity, and, a month later, a road trip with Joey and his older brother Barry in a Volkswagen Beetle headed to California. Lilly’s gullible, preoccupied mother believes Lilly’s story that this is a family trip with adult supervision. Trouble begins almost immediately, however, when the group is joined by another lovely young woman; a bi-curious speed freak; and a snake-killing survivalist. Jealousies, unbridled drug use and a general lack of boundaries all contribute to a trip that inevitably ends badly. Young-adult readers may be fascinated to learn about a relatively recent era when parents had no way to track or communicate with their wandering children, and some parents may react with horror at the same freedoms they had as teenagers. The youth culture of the 1970s offers a minefield of significant issues with dramatic potential, but Waite skates over many of them, despite the fact that women’s body images, self-medication with drugs, sexual orientations and family dysfunctions are just as relevant now as they were then. Instead, the book peppers the meandering plot with incidental snippets about pelvic waxing, Oreo-eating habits and the many colorful names for types of LSD. Overall, however, it’s surprisingly grim and unfocused for a story about a cross-country teenage romp.
A well-meaning effort that squanders a chance to tell a cohesive story about an ebbing youth culture.Pub Date: May 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0615664880
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Lesley Meirovitz Waite
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.
Heidish (A Misplaced Woman, 2016, etc.) presents an account of St. Francis of Assisi’s life, as told from his father’s perspective in poetic form.
St. Francis is known as a saint who believed in living the Gospel, gave sermons to birds, and tamed a wolf. Over the course of 84 poems, Heidish tells her own fictionalized version of the saint’s journey. In his youth, Francesco is an apprentice of his father, Pietro Bernardone, a fabric importer. The boy is a sensitive dreamer and nature lover who sees “natural holiness in every living thing.” As an adult, Francesco decides to pursue knighthood, but God warns him to “Go back, child / Serve the master.” He joins the Church of San Damiano, steals his father’s storeroom stock, and sells it to rebuild the church. His furious father chains him in the cellar, and the bishop orders Francesco to repay the debt. Afterward, father and son stop speaking to each other; Francesco becomes a healer of the sick and a proficient preacher. After failing to broker a peace agreement during wartime, Francesco falls into depression and resigns his church position. He retreats to the mountains and eventually dies; it’s only then that Pietro becomes a true follower of St. Francis: “You are the father now and I the son / learning still what it means to be a saint,” he says. Heidish’s decision to tell this story from Pietro’s perspective is what makes this oft-told legend seem fresh again. She uses superb similes and metaphors; for example, at different points, she writes that St. Francis had eyes like “lit wicks” and a spirit that “shone like a clean copper pot.” In another instance, she describes the Church of San Damiano as a place in which “walls crumbled / like stale dry bread.” Following the poems, the author also offers a thorough and engaging historical summary of the real life of St. Francis, which only adds further context and depth to the tale.
An emotional, captivating Christian story in verse.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9905262-1-6
Page Count: 146
Publisher: Dolan & Associates
Review Posted Online: April 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.
A debut volume of poetry explores love and war.
Divided into four sections, Osaki’s book covers vast emotional territories. Section 1, entitled “Walking Back the Cat,” is a reflection on youthful relationships both familial and romantic. “Dying Arts,” the second part, is an examination of war and its brutal consequences. But sections three and four, named “Tradecraft” and “Best Evidence” respectively, do not appear to group poems by theme. The collection opens with “My Father Holding Squash,” one of Osaki’s strongest poems. It introduces the poet’s preoccupation with ephemera—particularly old photographs and letters. Here he describes a photo that is “several years old” of his father in his garden. Osaki muses that an invisible caption reads: “Look at this, you poetry-writing / jackass. Not everything I raise is useless!” The squash is described as “bearable fruit,” wryly hinting that the poet son is considered somewhat less bearable in his father’s eyes. Again, in the poem “Photograph,” Osaki is at his best, sensuously describing a shot of a young woman and the fleeting nature of that moment spent with her: “I know only that I was with her / in a room years ago, and that the sun filtering / into that room faded instantly upon striking the floor.” Wistful nostalgia gives way to violence in “Dying Arts.” Poems such as “Preserve” present a battleground dystopia: “Upturned graves and craters / to swim in when it rains. / Small children shake skulls / like rattles, while older ones carve rifles / out of bone.” Meanwhile, “Silver Star” considers the act of escorting the coffin of a dead soldier home, and “Gun Song” ruminates on owning a weapon to protect against home invasion. The language is more jagged here but powerfully unsettling nonetheless. The collection boasts a range of promising poetic voices, but they do not speak to one another, a common pitfall found in debuts. “Walking Back the Cat” is outstanding in its refined attention to detail; the sections following it read as though they have been produced by two or more other poets. Nevertheless, this is thoughtful, timely writing that demands further attention.
A poignant collection by a talented poet still in search of one defining voice.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-984198-32-7
Page Count: 66
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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