A jam-packed ride through early-20th-century performance culture, if one can hold on.
Raised on the road with vaudevillian parents and gifted with a golden voice, young Teresa LeClair sets out to “shoot for the stars—or die trying” in Ketchum’s newest historical novel.
Though Resa longs for fame and the bright lights of the stage, her French-Canadian father has other plans. He expects the 15-year-old white girl to put her perfect pitch to work at the Estey organ factory in Brattleboro, Vermont. Victory in a local singing competition and taunting encouragement from a young African-American tap dancer, Pietro Jones, compel Teresa to run away to New York City rather than settle for a life in the tuning rooms of Estey. Restrictions on young performers as well as the specter of segregation and racial inequality are consistent trials throughout the story. Discussion of the practice of blackface will likely give some readers pause. The pace is quick, but at times it’s to the detriment of narrative flow, as readers must pause to recalibrate how they arrived at many plot points. Many characters come and go without much development, as if plugged in simply to fill holes, but this also serves to illustrate the transient nature of life in the theater.
A jam-packed ride through early-20th-century performance culture, if one can hold on. (list of songs, author’s note, glossary, bibliography) (Historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4405-9876-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Merit Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel,...
Adventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.
Elisa—Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle—has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone—and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra—can save them. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202648-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
Characters to love, quips to snort at, insights to ponder: typical Spinelli.
For two teenagers, a small town’s annual cautionary ritual becomes both a life- and a death-changing experience.
On the second Wednesday in June, every eighth grader in Amber Springs, Pennsylvania, gets a black shirt, the name and picture of a teen killed the previous year through reckless behavior—and the silent treatment from everyone in town. Like many of his classmates, shy, self-conscious Robbie “Worm” Tarnauer has been looking forward to Dead Wed as a day for cutting loose rather than sober reflection…until he finds himself talking to a strange girl or, as she would have it, “spectral maiden,” only he can see or touch. Becca Finch is as surprised and confused as Worm, only remembering losing control of her car on an icy slope that past Christmas Eve. But being (or having been, anyway) a more outgoing sort, she sees their encounter as a sign that she’s got a mission. What follows, in a long conversational ramble through town and beyond, is a day at once ordinary yet rich in discovery and self-discovery—not just for Worm, but for Becca too, with a climactic twist that leaves both ready, or readier, for whatever may come next. Spinelli shines at setting a tongue-in-cheek tone for a tale with serious underpinnings, and as in Stargirl (2000), readers will be swept into the relationship that develops between this adolescent odd couple. Characters follow a White default.
Characters to love, quips to snort at, insights to ponder: typical Spinelli. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-30667-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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