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
Surprisingly heartfelt. (Fiction. 14-16)
In his final year of high school, Leon must choose between maintaining his comfortable existence or blowing it all up to chase something greater.
Leon is on track to do nothing extraordinary with his life. He works at the local ice cream shop alongside his best friend, Stan, and hangs out with the screwballs and weirdos that come in. The gang shuns such bourgeois drudgery as the SATs and college applications in favor of typical teenage tomfoolery, but there’s a fine line between a smart, bored kid and a burnout. Leon is the former. When a few moments of chance bring him and popular girl Paige together, Leon begins to shake out of his slacker stupor. This is a particularly smart and sweet teenage love story, refusing to rely on burning passion or overwrought sentiment. There’s an emotional maturity in the way Selzer draws Leon and Paige’s courtship. It is by far the best part of the book. Less engaging are the peripheral characters, particularly Stan, a kid who believes that he’s the devil himself. The character and his influence on the story just don’t work, and time spent with him feels wasted when it could be spent elsewhere. Leon’s journey to personal responsibility is another topic well-tackled, making this an engaging, character-driven piece with several pros that mightily outweigh the cons.
Surprisingly heartfelt. (Fiction. 14-16)Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4814-0104-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
This thoughtful, considered action-adventure will have readers pondering even after they’ve closed the book
Picking up where Blackout (2013) left off, Wells continues to look at the impact of terrorism and the morality of war.
The United States is under attack, with Russia landing troops in the Pacific Northwest and saboteurs striking without warning. Aubrey and Jack have been recruited into the military, and after just a few weeks of basic training, they are forced into the field on their first mission. With Aubrey’s ability to become invisible and Jack’s to read minds, they hope they can find the secret weapon deployed against them: an electromagnetic-pulse device that knocks out all electrical functions with no warning, wreaking havoc. Little do they know the secret weapon is just like them—a pair of teens infected with an enhancement virus as youngsters. Zasha and Fyodor have trained their whole lives for this, and Zasha in particular isn’t about to let anything—or anyone—get in their way. Amid the action, Wells raises deep questions. As Aubrey struggles to understand why killing enemy soldiers isn’t murder, Jack and their platoon mates (other “lambdas” like themselves) struggle to understand why the burden of warfare is being thrust on their young shoulders. Jack and Aubrey wrestle with these issues and more as the story races to a satisfying conclusion.
This thoughtful, considered action-adventure will have readers pondering even after they’ve closed the book . (Science fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-227502-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperTeen
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
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