Rayona Taylor, the heroine from Dorris's adult novels, A Yellow Raft in Blue River (1987) and Cloud Chamber (1997), is featured in this prequel, about her life as an 11-year-old who is abandoned by her Native American mother, and shuffled from place to place by her African-American father. Rayona spends time in two foster homes before she ends up with her father's mother, sister, and grandmother, who are white. Wherever she goes, Rayona has an effect on the adults—they grow and change while she stays the same. The first-person narration is sophisticated and perceptive, and seems to promise more of a story than it delivers: As the three older women and Rayona climb in a car for a cross-country trip back to the girl's mother, readers are ready for the story to begin at last, until they realize that there are only 20 pages left in the book. Dorris's lyrical writing and ability to create evocative moments will sustain those who have read his historical novels, but won't give them an idea of the real Rayona of the earlier books. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-7868-0301-0
Page Count: 106
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
A teenager suffers through her parents’ separation in this smoothly stylized, if conventional, debut. Aurora’s world comes crashing down when she catches her artist father nuzzling a model. Rory, a talented artist herself, furiously burns her sketchbook; suddenly he’s gone, leaving Rory and her mother wallowing in teary guilt, sending back a letter with lines that infuriate: “one day you’ll understand,” and “someday, when you’re older . . . “ Rory stops all painting and drawing, and curls up around the hurt, stonewalling even her best friend, Nicky. Rory’s almost continual awareness of light and color gives her a convincing artist’s voice, and Mack sets her back on her feet in the end, with the help of time, Nicky’s loyalty, and a startling gift from her father: her charred sketchbook, rescued and repaired both as a sign of his love, and to remind her to believe in herself. Psychological insight here is but skin deep, and the characters play it pretty close to type, but readers may be affected by the story’s overall emotional intensity. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-439-11202-8
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Patneaude (The Last Man’s Reward, 1996, etc.) hatches a silly plot and one-dimensional characters, but preteens might enjoy this piece of escapist entertainment about a boy wrongly committed to a mental asylum. Peter’s weak-willed mother has lied to him all his life about his real father, allegedly dead. Peter doesn’t get along with his stepfather, a car salesman, who schemes to have him committed by a corrupt psychiatrist. In the asylum, Peter befriends two disturbed inmates and a health technician who help him escape. Among the absurd plot concoctions: Peter’s five-year-old half-brother, Lincoln, is psychic, allowing Peter extraordinary access to clues he needs to find his real father; and that his father has been searching for Peter all along. Patneaude resurrects elements from his first novel, Someone Was Watching (1993), in which a supposedly drowned sister has really been kidnapped, and in which a cross-country trip unfolds without much mishap. His writing style, however, is so robust that even if readers find little remotely connected to reality in these pages, there’s more than enough suspense in the fast-paced narrative to keep them entertained. (Fiction. 8-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8075-9098-3
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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