This biracial, LGBTQ protagonist seamlessly shifts from comics to prose in a winner of a series opener.
Girl detective Goldie Vance moves from graphic novels to middle-grade prose.
Crossed Palms Resort valet and permanent resident Goldie Vance is a hopeful apprentice detective waiting for a big break. When movie star Delphine “the Temptress of the Ocean” Lucerne comes to Goldie’s decidedly unglamorous Florida town to shoot a film, her arrival is soon followed by a theft—the 10-pound, diamond-laden swim cap made for Delphine’s character in the film. What makes this complicated for Goldie is that clues seem to be pointing toward her mother as the culprit. But that can’t be true. Now Goldie has two tasks, not just one: find the swim cap and clear her mother’s name. Rivera’s novel for teens Dealing in Dreams (2019) was filled with creative, believable, and consistent slang and jargon; here she shows herself to be skilled at combining noir language conventions with contemporary sensibilities in a way that doesn’t feel anachronistic but is just a gas! Like Nancy Drew, brown-skinned Goldie is a teen girl, but her adventure really is entertaining and accessible for all ages—without the wooden characters or racism of the Carolyn Keene classics and with a little insertion of comics courtesy of Power to remind us where she came from.
This biracial, LGBTQ protagonist seamlessly shifts from comics to prose in a winner of a series opener. (Mystery. 10-16)Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-45664-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 11, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
A fun, if messy, thriller that’s not afraid to go straight over the top.
A middle schooler must outrun a cadre of strange individuals while puzzling out the truth of what he is in this science-fiction offering.
Fourteen-year-old Noah Prime longs to live somewhere bigger than his small town of Arbuckle, Oregon, though he is happily involved in motocross—at least until he learns that the course is being torn down to make way for a condo development. This bad news coincides with some particularly strange happenings in Noah’s life, such as a literal (and very confusing) collision he has with Sahara, a girl that he comes to find very interesting. This is followed by his experiencing a brief and total paralysis while arguing with some bullies, which his friend Ogden, who is on the autism spectrum, insists is due to a psychological phenomenon called conversion disorder. The truth turns out to be much more complex, and it sends Noah, younger sister Andi, Ogden, and Sahara on a madcap quest involving aliens, time travel, an erupting volcano, and much more. The adventure is laced throughout with goofy, sarcastic humor, balancing the fantastical and somewhat confusing turns of events. While there is resolution at the story’s end, it also clearly sets the stage for a follow-up. The main characters read White by default.
A fun, if messy, thriller that’s not afraid to go straight over the top. (Science fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: April 11, 2023
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5524-2
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
Light on gore and corpses; otherwise a full-bore, uncomplicated shriekfest.
Does anyone who volunteers to spend a night in a derelict haunted hotel on a dare deserve what they get?
“The hotel is hungry. And we aren’t leaving here until it’s fed.” In what reads like a determined effort to check off every trope of the genre, Alexander sends new arrival Jasmine, along with two friends and several dozen other classmates, to the long-abandoned Carlisle Hotel for the annual seventh grade Dare—touching off a night of terror presided over by the leering, autocratic Grand Dame and complete with sudden gusts and blackouts, spectral visions, evil reflections in mirrors, skeletons, a giant spider, gravity reversals, tides of oily black sludge sucking screaming middle schoolers down the drain, and so much more. (No gore, though, aside from a few perfunctory drops of blood from one small scratch.) The author saves a twist for the end, and as inducement to read alone or aloud in the dark by flashlight, both his language and the typography crank up the melodrama: “He walks toward us, past the mirror, and I see it— / a pale white face in the reflection, / a gaunt, skeletal grimace, / with sharpened teeth / and hollow black eyes, staring at him / with its mouth / wide / open / in a scream….” Jasmine presents White; her closest friends are Rohan, whose name cues him as South Asian, and Mira, who has dark skin.
Light on gore and corpses; otherwise a full-bore, uncomplicated shriekfest. (Horror. 10-13)Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-70215-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2021
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
