It is far beyond the emotional understanding of the usual picture-book audience and ultimately without substance or purpose...
"March to the beat of your own drummer and never look back," appears to be the theme of this picture book for teens.
Thomas resents and defies family, teachers and peers, whether they are asking him to keep clean, do his homework or show respect. He hides behind his headphones as they deliver accusations and predict his failure, but he offers nothing as an alternative. He interprets cultural pressures that urge him to join the military or to vote or to embrace religion as demands to “do as we say, think like us, be like us.” This mantra appears frequently, sometimes shouting at readers in large bold letters and sometimes hiding in gray beneath other text. Gleeson’s spare, terse syntax is woven within and around Greder’s stark, rather vicious, gray-and-black illustrations that variously fill the pages or are scattered in panels. Thomas is depicted only in the final pages, drawn in lightly colored hues, first surrounded by childhood toys and last seen heading for a bus, presumably leaving home with destination and future unknown. All of this is way beyond teenage angst or even a search for one’s passion or raison d’etre. The overall mood of the piece is one of intense, unremitting anger.
It is far beyond the emotional understanding of the usual picture-book audience and ultimately without substance or purpose for older readers. Dark, bitter and disturbing. (Picture book. 13 & up)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-74237-333-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A boarding-school story set in the aftermath of the Rhodesian Civil War examines evil from all sides and provides no easy answers. The Haven School for boys is anything but for narrator Robert Jacklin. When the boy arrives from England at 13, the son of a liberal intellectual attached to the British Embassy, he initially makes friends with one of the school's few black students, but he quickly learns that safety and acceptance are among the school's white elite. Over the course of the next five years he changes from likable milquetoast into a thug's accessory, understanding and hating but choosing to ignore his moral compromise. Wallace, in his debut, draws on his own childhood in post-revolutionary Zimbabwe to inform this grimly magnetic snapshot of petty evil. In many regards, it's a classic boarding-school novel, full of A Separate Peace–like inevitability; narrator Robert is liberal with "had I but known" statements foreshadowing some kind of doom. But as Robert's mentor in brutality becomes ever more unhinged, the tension ratchets up and the book turns into a first-rate, surprisingly believable thriller. In its portrayal of race relations in a wounded country as well as of the ugly power dynamics of a community of adolescent boys, this novel excels, bringing readers up to the grim, uncertain present with mastery. (Historical fiction. 14 & up)
Pub Date: April 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2342-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
A family copes with a daughter’s quirks in Walker’s fanciful, heartwarming tale of Asperger’s syndrome.
Like any new parents, Ben Long, a successful Hawaiian pediatrician, and his wife Francesca have high hopes for their first child. Their baby Mia has high hopes for them, too: as a yet-to-be-born spirit in heaven, she noticed Francesca’s kindness and patience and picked her out as her future mom. Mia relies on Francesca’s nurturing qualities because she will be born with Asperger’s syndrome, a mild, often undiagnosed variant of autism. Her parents find her to be a bright, precocious, musical child, but also shy, socially awkward, frightened by new situations and beset with food phobias. What seems to others to be mere eccentricity and cussedness is to Mia a rational response to her unusual cognitive traits. Mia is abnormally sensitive to stimuli: loud voices and bright lights hurt her ears and eyes, new clothes feel like sandpaper, perfume smells like tear gas. While she shrinks from these sensory assaults, her literal-mindedness makes her prone to obsessive anxieties: a news story about tainted hamburger leads to an epic school lunch-room battle and a bird’s nest collected by her grandmother strikes her as a nightmarish tangle of filth and decay. The author sets Mia’s first-person narrative within a larger family story told from Francesca’s point of view as she grapples with Ben’s exasperation over Mia’s problems, tussles with her difficult Chinese-American mother-in-law and weathers the heartache of her parents’ deaths. Writing with a limpid prose style deftly infused with medical research, Walker does a remarkable job illuminating Mia’s offbeat perspective from within; she makes it more a personality than an affliction. The book’s advocacy impulses occasionally overheat, as when Francesca goes ballistic over an incident in which mean girls tease Mia at school. Still, through Mia’s story, Walker dispels much of the mystery of Asperger’s kids while revealing the richness and promise of their lives. A poignant and enlightening coming-of-age saga.
Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450260510
Page Count: 156
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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