A compassionate look at the harrowing problem of addiction, anchored by strong characters and a message of hope.
Two high school seniors grapple with family and school pressures and try to break free of drugs and alcohol in Kerick’s (Come to my Window, 2015, etc.) YA novel.
On the surface, Lanny Keating and Trevor Ladd have nothing in common. Lanny is a star athlete and an excellent student from a good family who’s well on his way to earning a college football scholarship. Underneath his façade of perfection, however, he hides feelings of guilt and remorse; he blames himself for an accident that left his sister, Joelle, with a traumatic brain injury. Trevor is a lackluster student whose legal guardian, Carl, sexually and physically abuses him on a regular basis. Despite their differences, Lanny is drawn to Trevor and the two begin an intense relationship involving sexual exploration and alcohol and drug abuse. As their partying escalates, Lanny’s life falls apart: his grades plummet, he’s kicked off the football team, and he comes perilously close to failing his senior year. Meanwhile, Trevor wants to escape Carl’s abuse and knows that education is the key to a new life. As their senior year draws to a close, they both race against time to graduate and find sobriety. Kerick has crafted a sensitive but unflinching portrait of teenagers struggling to stop the cycle of addiction. The narrative offers well-developed characters and a strong story structure. Although the two young men come from different backgrounds, both turn to self-medication to mask the painful feelings that plague them. The author’s approach to her lead characters successfully conveys the message that their problems aren’t related to their socioeconomic backgrounds. Lanny and Trevor’s relationship never strikes a false note, as the chapters effectively show the events from both characters’ perspectives.
A compassionate look at the harrowing problem of addiction, anchored by strong characters and a message of hope.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 242
Publisher: YoungDudes Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
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