The bestselling author of the Princess Diaries series turns to a different head of state in a comedy about a privileged but disaffected adolescent girl whose life undergoes a radical transformation when she instinctively jumps on a gunman, foiling his plan to assassinate the president. Samantha Madison, who dyes all her clothing black to show her high-minded solidarity with the hungry, the homeless, and the art-program–deprived, is anything but a heroic figure. The middle child in an overachieving Washington, D.C., family, Samantha is stuck between her pretty and popular older sister, Lucy, a cheerleader “whose primary concern . . . is not missing a single sale at Club Monaco” and her super-smart younger sister, Rebecca, who is so brilliant that she’s “practically an idiot savant.” Worse, Samantha is madly in love with Lucy’s boyfriend, Jack, an alienated, earring-wearing, aspiring artist who not so incidentally also happens to be a hunk. Written in the first person, Cabot’s strength is her heroine’s funny, authentic voice, though her utilization of trendy labels and extreme colloquial style may limit the material’s longevity. After saving the president’s life, Samantha is suddenly catapulted from nobody to national hero in the world at large and from social outcast to social arbiter in the microcosm of her school. Ambivalence over her burgeoning celebrity and mushrooming popularity, coupled with high-level political conflicts involving her new duties as the US teen ambassador to the UN and a budding but bumpy relationship with the first son, keeps the plot rolling, all the way to its satisfying, distinctively American conclusion. Great fun. (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-029469-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
At the end of the term, a new student who is black and Vietnamese finds a morsel of hope that she too will find a place in...
This is almost like a play for 18 voices, as Grimes (Stepping Out with Grandma Mac, not reviewed, etc.) moves her narration among a group of high school students in the Bronx.
The English teacher, Mr. Ward, accepts a set of poems from Wesley, his response to a month of reading poetry from the Harlem Renaissance. Soon there’s an open-mike poetry reading, sponsored by Mr. Ward, every month, and then later, every week. The chapters in the students’ voices alternate with the poems read by that student, defiant, shy, terrified. All of them, black, Latino, white, male, and female, talk about the unease and alienation endemic to their ages, and they do it in fresh and appealing voices. Among them: Janelle, who is tired of being called fat; Leslie, who finds friendship in another who has lost her mom; Diondra, who hides her art from her father; Tyrone, who has faith in words and in his “moms”; Devon, whose love for books and jazz gets jeers. Beyond those capsules are rich and complex teens, and their tentative reaching out to each other increases as through the poems they also find more of themselves. Steve writes: “But hey! Joy / is not a crime, though / some people / make it seem so.”
At the end of the term, a new student who is black and Vietnamese finds a morsel of hope that she too will find a place in the poetry. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8037-2569-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
The wish-fulfilling title and sun-washed, catalog-beautiful teens on the cover will be enticing for girls looking for a...
Han’s leisurely paced, somewhat somber narrative revisits several beach-house summers in flashback through the eyes of now 15-year-old Isabel, known to all as Belly.
Belly measures her growing self by these summers and by her lifelong relationship with the older boys, her brother and her mother’s best friend’s two sons. Belly’s dawning awareness of her sexuality and that of the boys is a strong theme, as is the sense of summer as a separate and reflective time and place: Readers get glimpses of kisses on the beach, her best friend’s flirtations during one summer’s visit, a first date. In the background the two mothers renew their friendship each year, and Lauren, Belly’s mother, provides support for her friend—if not, unfortunately, for the children—in Susannah’s losing battle with breast cancer. Besides the mostly off-stage issue of a parent’s severe illness there’s not much here to challenge most readers—driving, beer-drinking, divorce, a moment of surprise at the mothers smoking medicinal pot together.
The wish-fulfilling title and sun-washed, catalog-beautiful teens on the cover will be enticing for girls looking for a diversion. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4169-6823-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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