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
Certain to provoke controversy and difficult to see as a book for children, who could easily miss the painful point.
After Hitler appoints Bruno’s father commandant of Auschwitz, Bruno (nine) is unhappy with his new surroundings compared to the luxury of his home in Berlin.
The literal-minded Bruno, with amazingly little political and social awareness, never gains comprehension of the prisoners (all in “striped pajamas”) or the malignant nature of the death camp. He overcomes loneliness and isolation only when he discovers another boy, Shmuel, on the other side of the camp’s fence. For months, the two meet, becoming secret best friends even though they can never play together. Although Bruno’s family corrects him, he childishly calls the camp “Out-With” and the Fuhrer “Fury.” As a literary device, it could be said to be credibly rooted in Bruno’s consistent, guileless characterization, though it’s difficult to believe in reality. The tragic story’s point of view is unique: the corrosive effect of brutality on Nazi family life as seen through the eyes of a naïf. Some will believe that the fable form, in which the illogical may serve the objective of moral instruction, succeeds in Boyne’s narrative; others will believe it was the wrong choice.
Certain to provoke controversy and difficult to see as a book for children, who could easily miss the painful point. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-75106-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: David Fickling/Random
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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