McCafferty knows her way around this age group; her depictions are pitch-perfect and will loudly resonate with girls facing...
Jessica Darling is back for a second funny and fluffy try at navigating the perils of seventh grade (Jessica Darling’s It List 1, 2013).
Her popular but ever-so-shallow older sister has provided a second short list—easy to misinterpret, it turns out—of pithy advice that is supposed to help Jessica identify true friends, foes and faux friends. Seventh grade offers a large collection of all of these. Her now-popular BFF Bridget has joined forces with their friend Dori, effectively excluding Jessica from their former threesome. Worse yet, Dori’s sure Jessica is making a play for her new boyfriend, Scotty. And Sara and Manda are sure to capitalize on any potential opening into the world of popularity, unconcerned, or perhaps even enjoying it, if Jessica becomes their hapless victim. Hope could be a friend; she’s hard to read. And then there are the boys: Both Scotty and Aleck may just have a thing for Jessica. The disastrous slumber party Jessica is cornered into hosting and her exclusion from two sets of group Halloween costumes worn by friends—or faux friends?—are so purely junior high behavior that if it weren’t all presented with ample humor, it might just be tragic.
McCafferty knows her way around this age group; her depictions are pitch-perfect and will loudly resonate with girls facing their own friends and foes. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-24504-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Poppy/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Not for the faint of heart or stomach (or maybe of any parts) but sure to be appreciated by middle school zombie cognoscenti.
Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle meets Left for Dead/The Walking Dead/Shaun of the Dead in a high-energy, high-humor look at the zombie apocalypse, complete with baseball (rather than cricket) bats.
The wholesome-seeming Iowa cornfields are a perfect setting for the emergence of ghastly anomalies: flesh-eating cows and baseball-coach zombies. The narrator hero, Rabi (for Rabindranath), and his youth baseball teammates and friends, Miguel and Joe, discover by chance that all is not well with their small town’s principal industry: the Milrow corporation’s giant feedlot and meat-production and -packing facility. The ponds of cow poo and crammed quarters for the animals are described in gaggingly smelly detail, and the bone-breaking, bloody, flesh-smashing encounters with the zombies have a high gross-out factor. The zombie cows and zombie humans who emerge from the muck are apparently a product of the food supply gone cuckoo in service of big-money profits with little concern for the end result. It’s up to Rabi and his pals to try to prove what’s going on—and to survive the corporation’s efforts to silence them. Much as Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker (2010) was a clarion call to action against climate change, here’s a signal alert to young teens to think about what they eat, while the considerable appeal of the characters and plot defies any preachiness.
Not for the faint of heart or stomach (or maybe of any parts) but sure to be appreciated by middle school zombie cognoscenti. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-22078-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
A predictable, fast-paced sports tale with some unexpected heart.
Harrison has led a hard-knock life up until he’s taken in by loving foster parents “Coach” and Jennifer.
After he inadvertently causes the man’s death, Harrison is taken from a brutal foster home run by a farmer who uses foster kids as unpaid labor, a situation blithely ignored by the county. His new foster parents are different. Coach is in charge of the middle school football team, and all 13-year-old Harrison has ever wanted to do is to play football, the perfect outlet for his seething undercurrent of anger at life. Oversized for his age, he’s brilliant at the game but also over-the-top aggressive, until a hit makes his knee start aching—and then life deals him another devastating blow. The pain isn’t an injury but bone cancer. Many of the characters—loving friends Justin and Becky, bully Leo, a mean-spirited math teacher, cancer victim Marty and the major, an amputee veteran who comes to rehabilitate Harrison after life-changing surgery—are straight out of the playbook for maudlin middle-grade fiction. Nevertheless, this effort edges above trite because of well-depicted football scenes and the sheer force of Harrison himself. His altogether believable anger diminishes his likability but breathes life into an otherwise stock role.
A predictable, fast-paced sports tale with some unexpected heart. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-208956-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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