A fast-paced but underdeveloped pirate story.
A teenage girl faces down pirates, sharks, and storms on the high seas in this debut YA novel.
Fifteen-year-old Carter Ellen Key has lived her entire life aboard the merchant ship Adventurer. After suffering the loss of her father in a brutal pirate raid when she was a small child, she grew into a headstrong teen under the watchful eye of her father’s former first mate, Capt. James Rosten. Although she’s an accomplished sailor with uncanny strength, her crewmates still consider it unsafe for her to be allowed off the ship when they’re docked at port. She’s never set foot on land, and she longs for the day that she’ll be allowed to strike out on her own. However, when tragedy strikes, Carter is soon cast into an unfamiliar world of treachery, kidnapping, and enslavement. She must rely on her wits and courage to get back home. This book is ostensibly set in the Regency period but largely eschews specifics, relying instead on 19th-century pirate clichés to cover for a lack of meaningful worldbuilding. Some story elements, such as Carter’s ability to speak dolphin, feel too childish for a YA audience and clash with attempts to engage with the hardships of life at sea or slavery. The secondary players are largely flat caricatures of villainy, innocence, or heroism, and barely any time is spent developing potential love interests. Conflicts are established and then resolved in frustrating ways, as when the protagonist is able to walk and evade detection despite having a serious leg injury from a shark bite. Carter, with her bullish strength paired with fragile self-confidence, has the makings of a refreshing and engaging heroine, and the concept of a historical series that follows the exploits of a female sailor has a lot of potential. The novel is at its best when Carter is in combat, which fits the narrative’s quick, frenetic pace. There are also many evocative descriptions of things like a monstrous storm, the interior of a pirate's cabin, or even the ocean itself, but this only highlights the lack of specificity of its overall worldbuilding.
A fast-paced but underdeveloped pirate story. (author bio)Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64462-076-2
Page Count: 226
Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A concise, thoughtful narrative that challenges the concept and ideals of allyship through an unexpected lens.
A white Ivy League student reconsiders his racial and class privilege when he runs for student government.
After the death of his best friend, Manny Rivers—a Black teenager who was fatally shot by an off-duty cop—Jared Peter Christensen realized that his whiteness and wealth protected him from the bigotry that Manny couldn’t escape. Now a rising junior at an elite college in Connecticut, Jared wants to make a meaningful impact on the world. He’s also determined to block John Preston LePlante IV, a self-proclaimed “blue-blooded Florida boy,” from winning junior class council president. But Jared’s plans are thrown for a loop when he meets Dylan Marie Coleman, a Black transfer student who enters the campus election. Initially guarded, Dylan opens up to Jared, and a mutual yet fragile romantic attraction blooms. As Jared tries to sort out his conflicting feelings, he writes letters to Manny. Can he earn Dylan’s heart and—more importantly—shed his old habits? In this final installment of Stone’s trilogy that began with Dear Martin (2017), Jared’s fraught journey is depicted with nuance, emotional honesty, and accessible realism. Through his mistakes, Jared learns about the insidious consequences of white supremacy and his complicity in a corrupt system. The positive ending rightfully doesn’t fully resolve all the lingering questions, and readers will wonder if Jared continues to evolve or if his resolutions are fleeting promises.
A concise, thoughtful narrative that challenges the concept and ideals of allyship through an unexpected lens. (author's note) (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593308011
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember.
Kai’s life is upended when his coastal village is devastated in Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami in this verse novel from an author who experienced them firsthand.
With his single mother, her parents, and his friend Ryu among the thousands missing or dead, biracial Kai, 17, is dazed and disoriented. His friend Shin’s supportive, but his intact family reminds Kai, whose American dad has been out of touch for years, of his loss. Kai’s isolation is amplified by his uncertain cultural status. Playing soccer and his growing friendship with shy Keiko barely lessen his despair. Then he’s invited to join a group of Japanese teens traveling to New York to meet others who as teenagers lost parents in the 9/11 attacks a decade earlier. Though at first reluctant, Kai agrees to go and, in the process, begins to imagine a future. Like graphic novels, today’s spare novels in verse (the subgenre concerning disasters especially) are significantly shaped by what’s left out. Lacking art’s visceral power to grab attention, verse novels may—as here—feel sparsely plotted with underdeveloped characters portrayed from a distance in elegiac monotone. Kai’s a generic figure, a coat hanger for the disaster’s main event, his victories mostly unearned; in striking contrast, his rural Japanese community and how they endure catastrophe and overwhelming losses—what they do and don’t do for one another, comforts they miss, kindnesses they value—spring to life.
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember. (author preface, afterword) (Verse fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-53474-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
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