Difficult topics are artfully explored through swiftly moving, carefully worded poems.
High school student Gabi faces life-altering changes.
Gabi finds balance through a robust yoga practice, a passion she shares with her best friend, Ava. Her world is shattered when Gabi’s mom decides to move them from their home in Iowa to Maine to be closer to a new boyfriend for whom she has just left Gabi’s dad. Gabi, feeling uprooted and angered by the move, says goodbye to her school and begrudgingly sets off on the road trip with her mom. Soon into their drive, however, Gabi hears reports of an active shooter at the school she has just left and learns that every single one of her American history classmates has been murdered. She cycles through guilt, grief, outrage, and depression as she struggles to make sense of the tragedy on top of the stresses of her already tumultuous home life. In Maine, Gabi strives to find an outlet for her feelings, experimenting with self-destructive behavior before returning to her yoga roots to find peace and acceptance. Yoga calms both her turbulent emotions and her inner critic. Biracial Gabi has Mexican and German ancestry; she reflects on stigma surrounding body size and her internalized shame, as she used to wish she looked like her thin, Mexican paternal grandmother rather than her round-bodied White mother. This verse novel will grip reluctant readers with drama that is both realistic and emotionally charged.
Difficult topics are artfully explored through swiftly moving, carefully worded poems. (Verse novel. 14-18)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-978595-48-4
Page Count: 200
Publisher: West 44 Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A great read offering entertainment, encouragement, and plenty to reflect upon.
A gay teen contends with time travel—and homophobia through the decades.
All Cuban American Luis wants is to be prom king with his boyfriend, but tiny upstate New York boarding school Antic Springs Academy, with its strict, Christian code of conduct, won’t even let them hold hands in public. After a disastrous prom committee meeting at which his attempt to make the event welcoming of queer couples is rejected by the principal, Luis gets quite literally knocked into the past—specifically, ASA in the year 1985. There he meets Chaz, a Black student who attended the school at the same time as Luis’ parents and who died under mysterious circumstances after being bullied for his sexuality. Luis now faces a choice between changing the past to help Chaz and preserving his own future existence. Fortunately, he has Ms. Silverthorn, a Black English teacher and beloved mentor, who offers him support in both timelines. The narrative explores the impacts of homophobia and being closeted, remaining optimistic without shying away from the more brutal aspects. Luis is a multifaceted character with an engaging voice whose flaws are confronted and examined throughout. The solid pacing and pleasant, fluid prose make this a page-turner. Luis’ boyfriend is cued as Chinese American, and his best friend is nonbinary; there is some diversity in ethnicity and sexuality in background characters, although the school is predominantly White.
A great read offering entertainment, encouragement, and plenty to reflect upon. (author's note) (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5476-0710-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A rare second volume that surpasses the first, with, happily, more intrigue and passion still to come.
A heady blend of courtly double-crossing, Faerie lore, and toxic attraction swirls together in the sequel to The Cruel Prince (2018).
Five months after engineering a coup, human teen Jude is starting to feel the strain of secretly controlling King Cardan and running his Faerie kingdom. Jude’s self-loathing and anger at the traumatic events of her childhood (her Faerie “dad” killed her parents, and Faerie is not a particularly easy place even for the best-adjusted human) drive her ambition, which is tempered by her desire to make the world she loves and hates a little fairer. Much of the story revolves around plotting (the Queen of the Undersea wants the throne; Jude’s Faerie father wants power; Jude’s twin, Taryn, wants her Faerie betrothed by her side), but the underlying tension—sexual and political—between Jude and Cardan also takes some unexpected twists. Black’s writing is both contemporary and classic; her world is, at this point, intensely well-realized, so that some plot twists seem almost inevitable. Faerie is a strange place where immortal, multihued, multiformed denizens can’t lie but can twist everything; Jude—who can lie—is an outlier, and her first-person, present-tense narration reveals more than she would choose. With curly dark brown hair, Jude and Taryn are never identified by race in human terms.
A rare second volume that surpasses the first, with, happily, more intrigue and passion still to come. (map) (Fantasy. 14-adult)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31035-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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