Too many miscues hamper this novel’s potential to create a believable and endearing teen protagonist.
Gardner’s YA novel follows a 13-year-old girl whose world is turned upside down when her terminally ill father sends her away to live with her uncle.
Katie McCabe is a troublemaker who causes her single-parent father, Ron—the town’s sheriff—seemingly endless strife. When she and her friend, Tommy, accidentally set a neighbor’s shed on fire while smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol, her dad does the unimaginable: he arranges for her to live with her uncle, Charlie, and his family. As Katie reels from the devastating news, she discovers her father’s true reason for the decision—he has terminal cancer. The strength of this story is in the emotional intensity and complexity of Katie’s painful journey of self-discovery. The author explores the turbulent teen years masterfully, examining numerous themes that will surely resonate with young readers, including bullying, dealing with grief and loss, first love, and finding one’s place in the world. Additionally, Gardner does a good job of capturing the personality of a 13-year-old, particularly through the deft use of first-person POV; When Katie notes the school principal’s crooked bow tie, she thinks to herself: “He didn’t need any help being dorkified.” The novel’s thematic power, however, is undermined by its complete lack of specificity when it comes to time and place. Readers are given no indicators of when the story takes place or where it is set, which lends the narrative a groundless feel. This nebulosity gives rise to numerous questions that take the reader out of the story: Why doesn’t anyone have cellphones, although other electronic devices are referenced? Where are the security cameras at the school? Where is it commonplace to see a student on horseback at a middle school? Finally, the contrived nature of some of the plot points in the latter half of the novel rankles; to say the story’s events defy believability is an understatement.
Too many miscues hamper this novel’s potential to create a believable and endearing teen protagonist.Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2023
ISBN: 978-1645480891
Page Count: 252
Publisher: Vesuvian Books
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting, brutal and beautifully told.
A devastating tale of greed and secrets springs from the summer that tore Cady’s life apart.
Cady Sinclair’s family uses its inherited wealth to ensure that each successive generation is blond, beautiful and powerful. Reunited each summer by the family patriarch on his private island, his three adult daughters and various grandchildren lead charmed, fairy-tale lives (an idea reinforced by the periodic inclusions of Cady’s reworkings of fairy tales to tell the Sinclair family story). But this is no sanitized, modern Disney fairy tale; this is Cinderella with her stepsisters’ slashed heels in bloody glass slippers. Cady’s fairy-tale retellings are dark, as is the personal tragedy that has led to her examination of the skeletons in the Sinclair castle’s closets; its rent turns out to be extracted in personal sacrifices. Brilliantly, Lockhart resists simply crucifying the Sinclairs, which might make the family’s foreshadowed tragedy predictable or even satisfying. Instead, she humanizes them (and their painful contradictions) by including nostalgic images that showcase the love shared among Cady, her two cousins closest in age, and Gat, the Heathcliff-esque figure she has always loved. Though increasingly disenchanted with the Sinclair legacy of self-absorption, the four believe family redemption is possible—if they have the courage to act. Their sincere hopes and foolish naïveté make the teens’ desperate, grand gesture all that much more tragic.
Riveting, brutal and beautifully told. (Fiction. 14 & up)Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-74126-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away.
A Mexican American boy takes on heavy responsibilities when his family is torn apart.
Mateo’s life is turned upside down the day U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents show up unsuccessfully seeking his Pa at his New York City bodega. The Garcias live in fear until the day both parents are picked up; his Pa is taken to jail and his Ma to a detention center. The adults around Mateo offer support to him and his 7-year-old sister, Sophie, however, he knows he is now responsible for caring for her and the bodega as well as trying to survive junior year—that is, if he wants to fulfill his dream to enter the drama program at the Tisch School of the Arts and become an actor. Mateo’s relationships with his friends Kimmie and Adam (a potential love interest) also suffer repercussions as he keeps his situation a secret. Kimmie is half Korean (her other half is unspecified) and Adam is Italian American; Mateo feels disconnected from them, less American, and with worries they can’t understand. He talks himself out of choosing a safer course of action, a decision that deepens the story. Mateo’s self-awareness and inner monologue at times make him seem older than 16, and, with significant turmoil in the main plot, some side elements feel underdeveloped. Aleman’s narrative joins the ranks of heart-wrenching stories of migrant families who have been separated.
An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5605-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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