While Leo’s story won’t set any records, the right readers will happily race with him to the finish line.
Currinder’s quiet debut explores the complexities of living with a sibling with disabilities.
High school junior Leo loves his older brother, Caleb, even if he doesn’t always understand him. Caleb has autism, seizures, and unspecified cognitive delays that cause him to process and communicate with the world in ways that Leo does not. As Caleb’s interactions with him become increasingly violent (though seemingly nonmalicious), Leo takes up running as a form of escape, firmly deciding he would rather find his own escape than risk institutionalizing Caleb. When their family decides to move from their St. Louis suburb to a town that will provide more privacy, Leo is excited about the prospect of joining his new school’s cross-country team. The team, it turns out, is made up primarily of undedicated outsiders, with the exception of Curtis, an unusually formal and focused senior who immediately takes Leo under his wing. As Leo juggles his friendship with Curtis and a budding relationship with a female classmate, he also works to balance his home life, struggling with his relationship with Curtis and watching his parents’ relationship rapidly deteriorate. Leo’s first-person narration expresses affection and respect for Caleb, although his lengthy descriptions of training and races tend to drag for readers who are not enthusiastic runners. A late-in-the-book tragedy affirms problematic disability tropes, cheapens what seems otherwise to have been a sensitive depiction of a character with intersecting disabilities, and turns Caleb into a plot device. The primary cast is a white one.
While Leo’s story won’t set any records, the right readers will happily race with him to the finish line. (Fiction. 14-17)Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-58089-802-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Charlesbridge Teen
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Unpredictable plot, vivid settings, and a queer, dark-skinned black girl as a protagonist in far-future science fiction:...
On a research mission to deep space, a girl makes bold and terrifying choices.
Miyole forged her papers to work on the Ranganathan, a 128,000-acre research-and-development ship. She’s 16, not the required 18, but she’s always wanted to travel into space and was impatient to leave Mumbai, where she was taunted as “the darkest” and “the exotic outlier” because she’s Haitian, not Indian. Onboard, she bioengineers bees and butterflies to pollinate terraformed planets. Then life takes a sharp turn: pirates attack a nearby spacecraft, and Miyole meets a girl named Cassia. Making the stunning decision to steal a shuttle so she and Cassia can pursue the pirates who kidnapped Cassia’s brother, Miyole pilots them into deep space. As they bargain with unsavory dealers, visit a frozen moon’s underwater settlements, and discover horrifying things, Miyole battles post-traumatic stress from an early-life catastrophe, including flashbacks that will be especially meaningful to readers who saw that tragedy unfold in Salvage (2014). Connections among her personal history, her ancestral history (the real-life Haitian Revolution; the science-fictional destruction, centuries ago, of Haiti by floods), and the atrocities she discovers in deep space are meaningful and well-wrought, as is the portrayal of Miyole’s tender and bumpy romance with Cassia.
Unpredictable plot, vivid settings, and a queer, dark-skinned black girl as a protagonist in far-future science fiction: essential. (Science fiction. 14-17)Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-222017-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
The novel isn’t a treatise about queer identities, so it doesn’t offer an answer on what this complicated concept means. But...
So, is femme a sexual orientation or a gender presentation?
Author Bach wraps this complicated question around the affable protagonist, Sofie, a “C-student” high schooler living in the real town of Surrey, located near Vancouver, British Columbia. What she looks forward to after high school is life with her star-athlete boyfriend, Paul, who pledges to take care of her by working at the family auto dealership even as she vaguely wishes to become a chef. Sofie’s aspirations—and life—change when her English teacher pairs her with Clea Thompson, whom Sofie describes as a “totally straight-A student” intent on winning a scholarship. Clea is also a mixed-race, out lesbian who leads the school’s Gay-Straight Alliance. Refreshingly, the author takes their racial difference as a matter of course, not a literary public-service announcement about interracial relationships. Nor does she frame Sofie’s changing views on her shifting relationships with Paul, Clea, and even her mom with heavy-handedness: Sofie’s shift regarding her present love and future life come from a healing touch, a clarifying word, and some tough conversations.
The novel isn’t a treatise about queer identities, so it doesn’t offer an answer on what this complicated concept means. But it’s a great introduction to how gender identity can be a segue for a love that, even in 2015, cannot speak its name. (Fiction. 14-17)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4594-0768-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: James Lorimer
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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