Heartwarming and humorous, a solid pick for young teen readers.
In this YA novel, a teenage girl learns life lessons about parents, puppies and puppy love.
Thirteen-year-old Julia, the protagonist of Ferguson Powers’ debut novel, is a pleasantly familiar archetype of young adult fiction: a girl on the cusp of adolescence who is precociously intelligent but, socially, a late bloomer. With her father serving overseas in the International Peace Forces and a workaholic mother who repeats the mantra “avoiding problems is better than having to solve them,” Julia devotes most of her time to her 8-year-old sister, Belinda, and when she can, observing wildlife to write about in the detailed log she maintains. The action starts with the arrival of a Portuguese water dog named Portia, whom the girls’ father has sent as a gift. When their mother leaves for a months long business trip, Julia and Belinda, with Portia in tow, go to spend the summer with their grandparents on a small island in the Pacific Northwest. In a series of episodic (and somewhat formulaic) adventures, the sisters train Portia, contend with bullying and get into plenty of trouble, all with the help of a neighbor boy, Mister Blue, whom their grandparents have encouraged them to befriend. Mister Blue, who is even shyer and stranger than Julia, ruffles her feathers at first—and the fact that his mother has recently died while serving in the National Guard does nothing to assuage her overwhelming worry about her father’s dangerous job. As their friendship deepens, however, Julia discovers that some people just may be as interesting as animals. Though Ferguson Powers’ writing is simple and declarative, her characters are three dimensional, and she uses the close third-person perspective to clever ends; when Julia meets Mister Blue, for instance, she reflects: “Probably he liked machines; most boys did.” Blunt and theatrical Belinda—who says aloud to her dolls at one point that “Julia worries enough for everybody”—is an especially funny character.
Heartwarming and humorous, a solid pick for young teen readers.Pub Date: June 26, 2012
ISBN: 978-0615547145
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Whidbey Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
A short, simple, and sweet tale about two friends and a horse.
A novel tells the story of two spirited girls who set out to save a lame foal in 1952.
Mary, age 12, lacks muscle control of her legs and must use a wheelchair. Her life is constantly interrupted by trips with her widower father to assorted doctors, all of whom have failed to help her. Mary tolerates the treatments, hoping to one day walk unassisted, but her true passion involves horses. Possessing a library filled with horse books, she loves watching and drawing the animals at a neighboring farm. She longs to own one herself. But her father, overprotective due to her disability and his own lingering grief over Mary’s dead mother, makes her keep her distance. Mary befriends Laura, the emotionally neglected daughter of the wealthy neighboring farm owners, and the two share secret buggy rides. Both girls are attracted to Illusion, a beautiful red bay filly on the farm. Mary learns that Illusion is to be put down by a veterinarian because of a lame leg. Horrified, she decides to talk to the barn manager about the horse (“Isn’t it okay for her to live even if she’s not perfect? I think she deserves a chance”). Soon, Mary and Laura attempt to raise money to save Illusion. At the same time, Mary begins to gain control of her legs thanks to water therapy and secret therapeutic riding with Laura. There is indeed a great deal of poignancy in a story of a girl with a disability fighting to defend the intrinsic value of a lame animal. But this book, the first installment of the Dream Horse Adventure Series, would be twice as touching if Mary interacted with Illusion more. In the tale’s opening, she watches the foal from afar, but she actually spends very little time with the filly she tries so hard to protect. This turns out to be a strange development given the degree to which the narrative relies on her devotion. Count (Selah’s Sweet Dream, 2015) draws Mary and Laura in broad but believable strokes, defined mainly by their unrelenting pluckiness in the face of adversity. While the work tackles disability, death, and grief, Mary’s and Laura’s environments are so idyllic and their optimism and perseverance so remarkable that the story retains an aura of uncomplicated gentleness throughout.
A short, simple, and sweet tale about two friends and a horse.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Hastings Creations Group
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.
Keridan’s poetry testifies to the pain of love and loss—and to the possibility of healing in the aftermath.
The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman once wrote that literature—and poetry, in particular—can help us “read the wound” of trauma. That is, it can allow one to express and explain one’s deepest hurts when everyday language fails. Keridan appears to have a similar understanding of poetry. She writes in “Foreword,” the opening work of her debut collection, that “pain frequently uses words as an escape route / (oh, how I know).” Many words—and a great deal of pain—escape in this volume, but the result is healing: “the ending is happy / the beginning was horrific / so let’s start there.” The book, then, tracks the process of recovery in the wake of suffering, and often, this suffering is brought on by romantic relationships gone wrong. An early untitled poem opens, “I die a little / taking pieces of me to feed the fire / that keeps him warm / you don’t notice that it’s a slow death / when you’re disappearing little by little.” The author’s imagery here—of the self fueling the dying fire of love—is simultaneously subtle and wrenching. But the poem’s message, amplified elsewhere in the book, is clear: We go wrong if we destructively give ourselves over to others, and healing comes only when we turn our energies back to our own good. Later poems, therefore, reveal that self-definition often equals strength. The process is painful but salutary; when “you’re left unprotected / surrounded by chaos with nothing you / can depend on / except yourself / and that’s when you gather the pieces / of the life you lost / and use them to build the life you want.” The “life you want” is an elusive goal, and the author knows that the path to self-definition is fraught with peril—but her collection may give strength to those who walk it.
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72770-538-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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BOOK REVIEW
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