A pleasant journey through a teen romance.
Charlie Owens’ part-time gig for a local ride-share app puts her on the path to self-discovery and an unlikely relationship.
The Backseat app is a convenient way for Charlie to make money. She regularly picks up riders while maintaining her top-notch driver rating. However, her record doesn’t stop her from hitting senior Andre Minasian’s parked car, which turns into her striking a deal: While his car is being repaired, she’ll drive him wherever and whenever he wants in exchange for his not reporting her to Backseat. Their many rides together give Charlie an opportunity to see something more in popular, sporty party boy Andre. Keating includes a side plot that involves a popular social media personality who works in sustainable building and design and is an idol of Charlie’s; there’s a contrived meeting and internship bid for Charlie that feel forced but ultimately end in a pleasant surprise. Charlie and Andre are both likable, with complicated personal lives that are believable without being melodramatic. Charlie is the last to understand things that readers (along with secondary characters) will readily perceive, a familiar tactic that Keating uses effectively to keep pages turning. This novel delivers the satisfying and comforting familiarity readers expect from the genre. Charlie reads as White; Andre is cued as Armenian American.
A pleasant journey through a teen romance. (Romance. 13-16)Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-46831-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Clarion/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The author leaves Alice and friends posing for graduation pictures and looking forward to pre-college summer jobs aboard a...
The newest entry in a series that sits proudly in second place on the ALA’s list of Most Banned/Challenged titles of the 21st century (behind Harry) takes its insecure but sensible 17-year-old narrator through her final semester of high school.
Alice navigates past such fixed points as Senior Prom, Prank Day and graduation as well as more personal triumphs and tribulations, from getting one of those flat business envelopes from her first-choice college to finding out that her boyfriend Patrick will be spending the next year in Spain. As ever, Naylor-as-Alice fills the interstices with teachable moments including (but not limited to) the short-lived appearance of a “Restricted Reading” shelf in the school library, watching an older co-worker and her loving husband with their new baby, coping with stress-related insomnia, attending a pregnant classmate’s baby shower and wedding and reacting to a friend’s admission that she’s saving up for a labiaplasty. It's all embedded in a milieu of quotidian detail, familiar characters and memories from previous episodes that add both continuity and a matter-of-fact credibility to the advice and insight.
The author leaves Alice and friends posing for graduation pictures and looking forward to pre-college summer jobs aboard a cruise ship that will frame the next few volumes in this richly entertaining, reliable and informative guide to growing up. (Fiction. 13-15)Pub Date: May 10, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4169-7553-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This sequel to The Dark Divine (2009) falls into the classic Twilight patterns: a blank slate of a heroine and a reliance on sexual tension and vague presentiments of danger to drive the narrative. Grace Divine is a werewolf now, bitten by her rogue-werewolf brother Jude before he ran off. Her family is falling apart, with her mother increasingly unstable at the loss of a child and her father traveling around the country seeking his lost son. Grace’s only joy is her relationship with her boyfriend Daniel, himself a former werewolf but now disturbingly standoffish. Now Grace is receiving mysterious phone calls that appear to be from her brother and that may be connected to the town’s unsolved rash of vandalism. Though the plot drags, Despain’s fans will be pleased by the introduction of a flannel-clad hottie who is more than ready to comfort Grace during Daniel’s mysterious absences. For those who find a surfeit of rippling muscles and naked pecs to be sufficient for an enjoyable romance. (Paranormal romance. 13-15)
Pub Date: Dec. 28, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60684-058-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Egmont USA
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2010
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