A compassionate portrait of a family struggling with painful changes, despite some heavy-handed moments.
Cassie’s whole world changes when her beloved older brother, Sef, goes to war in Iraq.
Before Sef even leaves, Cassie has nightmares about his demise. Once he’s gone, her family jumps at every phone call. To complicate matters, her father supports the war; her mother doesn’t. While her parents are preoccupied, her best friend, Sonia, inexplicably stops talking to her; her older sister, Van, tests out risky behaviors; and her developmentally delayed younger brother, Jack, becomes altogether silent. When a seventh-grade social-studies project leads her to a blog called Blue Sky, written by an Iraqi girl of similar age, Cassie starts to see the war from a different perspective. Blue Sky’s world is more literally torn apart—her city is destroyed, her family is terrorized, their home is often without electricity and running water. While Sullivan strives to raise difficult questions about American involvement in Iraq, some efforts come across as forced. Yet Cassie's first-person narration effectively captures the messiness of life in a loving family when outside-world events intervene. Through it all, Cassie discovers her own strengths and rallies everyone around her, just as Sef would have wanted her to do.
A compassionate portrait of a family struggling with painful changes, despite some heavy-handed moments. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-399-25684-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Nancy Paulsen Books
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2012
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A terrific premise buried beneath problem-novel tropes.
A gaggle of eighth graders find the coolest clubhouse ever.
Fulfilling the fantasies of anyone who’s ever constructed a fort in their bedroom or elsewhere, Korman hands his five middle schoolers a fully stocked bomb shelter constructed decades ago in the local woods by an eccentric tycoon and lost until a hurricane exposes the entrance. So, how to keep the hideout secret from interfering grown-ups—and, more particularly, from scary teen psychopath Jaeger Devlin? The challenge is tougher still when everyone in the central cast is saddled with something: C.J. struggles to hide injuries inflicted by the unstable stepdad his likewise abused mother persists in enabling; Jason is both caught in the middle of a vicious divorce and unable to stand up to his controlling girlfriend; Evan is not only abandoned by drug-abusing parents, but sees his big brother going to the bad thanks to Jaeger’s influence; Mitchell struggles with OCD–fueled anxieties and superstitions; and so forth. How to keep a story overtaxed with issues and conflicts from turning into a dreary slog? Spoiler alert: Neither the author nor his characters ultimately prove equal to the challenge. With the possible exception of Ricky Molina, one of the multiple narrators, everyone seems to be White.
A terrific premise buried beneath problem-novel tropes. (resources, author’s note) (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-62914-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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