A well-illustrated story that makes a few missteps but features an appealing heroine.
In this middle-grade fantasy novel, a girl steps through a magic barrier into a new realm, where she tries to help creatures suffering from a drought.
Eleven-year-old Alicia loves nothing more than the summers she spends with her parents at their cabin near Cascade, Idaho. The lake is a great place for swimming, snorkeling, and observing nature—something that Alicia, who loves earth science, especially enjoys. One day, she and her father row across the lake, but their day is cut short by rain. Just as they’re about to leave, Alicia spies something strange out of the corner of her eye. When she stops trying to focus on it, “suddenly, startlingly, everything pop[s] into clarity” for the girl, who steps forward and finds herself in a new and different reality. As her father searches for her frantically back home, Alicia befriends talking animals in the new world—called the “Wild Side” by its inhabitants. Mickey, a squirrel, explains that the Wild Side is suffering from “The Drying,” a drought caused by Gran’Tree, a tree so enormous that his branches block the sun and his roots suck up all the water. With the help of her new friends, Alicia goes on a dangerous journey to Gran’Tree, hoping that she can convince him to open the barrier, send her home, and end the Drying. Illustrator Allen’s (Four Decades of Paintings & Poems, 2014, etc.) lovely, sensitive black-and-white images accompany the text well. Foster structures his debut novel along the archetypal lines of The Wizard of Oz, which also features a human girl, unusual companions, and a risky journey to ask favors of an all-powerful being. This novel lacks Oz author L. Frank Baum’s loony inventiveness, however. Still, Alicia does come across as an intelligent, science-minded heroine for the modern era, and the story has a fresh ecological focus. Some perplexing authorial choices work against this theme, however; foxes, who are necessary predators, are cast as “evil,” for example, and a tree—often an emblem of ecological balance—hardly seems appropriate as a selfish, resource-stealing villain.
A well-illustrated story that makes a few missteps but features an appealing heroine.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9965683-8-8
Page Count: 188
Publisher: Z Girls Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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