From Plummer (The Unlikely Romance of Kate Bjorkman, 1995, etc.), an unusually complex tale of teenage pregnancy, in which the prospects for a happy ending are tempered by the difficulty of the available choices. Hannah Ziebarth, 15 and pregnant, lives in Salt Lake City, where her Mormon bishop was her deceased father’s best friend. The bishop looks after the family, but remotely, and doesn’t see that Hannah’s gentle mother hasn’t left the house since her husband died, hasn’t made a phone call, hasn’t even made a sandwich. Hannah, beset with her loss and her mother’s withdrawal, as well as overwhelmed by the myriad household tasks that have come with that withdrawal, falls for the smooth moves of Milo, who is rich, handsome, and popular. When she tells him she’s pregnant he hits her; never really stable, Hannah spirals out of control and wakes up in a hospital for troubled teens. Hannah’s perspective as she makes her voyage through therapy—and through pregnancy—alternates with commentary from her best friend, Trilby, and Milo’s put-upon younger brother, Roman, who is especially amusing in his take on his parents’ hero-worship of their oldest son. While the plot is wrapped up a bit too neatly, Hannah is a rich and rewarding presence; her aching losses nearly throb on the page. Plummer is not afraid to say that it is possible to overcome life’s demons, but it’s hard; that people can change, but not all do; that giving up a baby hurts. Sobering and definitely a page-turner. (Fiction. 13-15)
Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-32511-8
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
An eighth grader discovers five schoolmates with psychic powers in this amateurish effort from Lubar. Martin, who was expelled from every other junior high in six counties for mouthing off, is consigned to prison-like Edgeview Alternative School, along with other violent or nerdy teens deemed hopeless misfits. While trying to avoid both the ready fists of hulking bully Lester Bloodbath and the shock therapy meted out by Principal Davis, he meets Torchy, who can start fires without matches or lighters, Cheater Woo, whose test answers are always identical to someone else’s, and several others with odd, unconscious talents. Interspersing Martin’s tediously self-analytical narrative with flat attempts at humor, trite student essays, repetitive memos to faculty, and mawkish letters from home, Lugar draws the tale to a paradoxical climax in which the self-styled “psi five” scuttle Bloodbath’s plot to close the school down, but then do their best to earn releases. After realizing that he is psychic, able to read people’s deepest fears and hopes, Martin abruptly acquires a sense of responsibility and resolves never to abuse his talent. Padded with aimless subplots and earnest efforts to drum up sympathy for the one-dimensional cast’s brutal bullies and ineffectual teachers, this contrived story is a weak alternative to Stephanie Tolan’s Welcome to the Ark (1996) or Willo Davis Roberts’s The Girl with the Silver Eyes (1980). (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86646-1
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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