A quietly tender, if underwhelming, collection.
Nine girls struggle with passivity and agency in a collection of thematically linked short stories.
Canadian author Weber (If You Live Like Me, 2015, etc.) uses the stories of nine teenage girls to probe the depths of adolescence and womanhood. The title story follows a girl who is bullied by her looks-obsessed mother and controlling boyfriend; “deep girls are no fun,” he tells her. She dreams of rejecting them and immerses herself in classic literature. In “Out of the Woods,” a girl resents her mother’s agoraphobia and her grandmother’s recent breast cancer surgery; she is left as the maternal figure for them both. “Relativity” follows a babysitter’s crush on her charges’ father and jealousy of their apparently lazy, undeserving mother. The protagonists’ white default becomes explicit when blackness is othered; Southern dialect is rendered with condescending exaggeration. The girls’ movements toward agency are often spurred by a possessive boyfriend or father, but rather than standing up to the male figures in their lives, the girls tend to choose quietly stepping away. It’s a narrative choice that isn’t always satisfying even as it makes space for subtler kinds of female strength in a genre dominated by tough but two-dimensional warrior princesses. Ultimately, the blurred lines between depth, passivity, and weakness too often lead to anticlimax.
A quietly tender, if underwhelming, collection. (Fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: April 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-77086-531-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: DCB
Review Posted Online: Dec. 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
Rushed but lush, with a nice touch of Victorian post-humanism for an original twist
The prize for saving the world is having to do it all over again in this companion to the steampunk romance The Unnaturalists (2012).
Syrus, Vespa, Olivia and Bayne are trying to rebuild their empire after destroying the Creeping Waste. Empress Olivia rules her fractured people of humans and Elementals from a ramshackle warehouse, while her devoted admirer, the Tinker Syrus, tries unsuccessfully to repair it. The magic users Bayne and Vespa try to help, even as they dance around their own romantic tensions. New villains threaten the fragile peace. From within, they’re challenged by Bayne’s estranged, noble parents, who may well be ignoring Olivia’s edict and using myth distilled from murdered Elementals to power their engines. From without, an ancient and legendary evil threatens: Ximu, Queen of the Shadowspiders. In interleaved chapters told from Syrus’ present-tense, first-person perspective alternating with Vespa’s past-tense, third-person point of view, the adventure unfolds with jumpy pacing but luscious worldbuilding. Nineteenth-century science has become religion in this fairyland full of airships and clockwork beasties. There are clear missed opportunities here: “What in the name of Darwin and all his Apes” is the point of bringing in such a famous eccentric as Nikola Tesla—famous for a hatred of round objects and an obsession with the number three—if only to portray him just as a generic genius?
Rushed but lush, with a nice touch of Victorian post-humanism for an original twist . (Steampunk. 13-15)Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4424-5759-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
A quiet, lovely story with a satisfyingly sentimental ending.
A thoughtful teen reconnects with her nature-loving father on Cape Cod.
Fourteen year-old Clare is less than thrilled with her mother’s plan to have her spend three weeks on a remote island with her father, Richard: She hasn’t seen him in twelve years, and they only speak on Christmas. Vera and her third husband are jetting off to honeymoon in France, though, so Blackfish Island, ho! Richard isn’t much of a conversationalist, but his diffident silence lets Clare come to appreciate, in her own time, her father and his work preserving the nests and habitat of the endangered Northern diamondback terrapin. Gradually, through walks on the beach, kayaking around the bay and board games, the two find their way toward an honest and loving relationship. Some obnoxious neighbors, walking clichés whose every move embodies thoughtless entitlement and ignorance of the island’s natural rhythms, are the one weak spot here. Demas’ careful seeding of details about Richard’s life in the years between his divorce from Vera and his re-emergence in Clare’s life is subtle enough that the revelation of what held him back from maintaining any substantive relationship with her will be surprising and ring true to most readers. Their father-daughter bond feels both earned and earnest.
A quiet, lovely story with a satisfyingly sentimental ending. (Fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4677-1328-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Carolrhoda Lab
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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