by Michelle Embree ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 10, 2005
Sure to be shoplifted by teen delinquents, but also has a shot at adult cult status.
Teen girl troubles in the drug-addled suburbs of St. Louis.
Embree’s debut has roots in the punk-lit underground—drugs, disaffection, sex, violence and freakiness abound—but the weird innocence of its teen narrator makes it read like an uncensored YA novel. Angie is a fat, working class 16-year-old flirting with an eating disorder as she makes her way through adolescent terrors of identity and sexuality ratcheted up by drugs, isolation and violence. Her mother’s spoiled boyfriend has just moved in, and Angie’s best friend Shelby has declared she’s a lesbian. Angie and Shelby are relatively good kids committed to school, but when Shelby finds a girlfriend, Angie gets into trouble, alternately helped and hurt by her other friends. Embree assembles quite a cast: Heather, a sexy, one-breasted rich girl; Inez, the high school pot-head/dealer and guerilla performance artist; Carrie, a rich-girl anorexic with lesbian tendencies; Pike, a near-homeless teen dropout and sensitive artist; Troy and Mindy, two sexually sadistic rich kids; glamorous working-class Luann and her crystal-meth smoking hippie parents; and, most memorably, Shelby’s older sister Robyn, a tough-as-nails survivor who thrives on psychotic rage and deserves her own novel. Unfortunately, many of these characters remain mere sketches, as mysterious to the reader as they are to themselves. And while Embree casts a sharp eye on the complex lines of class and gender divisions (race is notably absent) that fuel the novel’s episodic violence, and raises fascinating questions about guilt and revenge, she allows Angie only a handful of insightful moments that are so moving and true, the reader can’t help but feel their absence elsewhere. There is the beginning of a much better book here, but readers who identify with the characters’ outsider status, or are drawn into the action as it rockets toward a climactic scene of Robyn-orchestrated retribution, probably won’t care.
Sure to be shoplifted by teen delinquents, but also has a shot at adult cult status.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2005
ISBN: 1-933368-02-0
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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by Jim Lynch ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 8, 2005
A celebratory song of the sea.
A shrimpy 13-year-old with a super-sized passion for marine life comes of age during a summer of discovery on the tidal flats of Puget Sound.
Miles O’Malley—Squid Boy to his friends—doesn’t mind being short. It’s other things that keep him awake at night, like his parents’ talk of divorce and his increasingly lustful thoughts about the girl next door. Mostly, though, it’s the ocean’s siren call that steals his sleep. During one of his moonlit kayak excursions, Miles comes across the rarest sighting ever documented in the northern Pacific: the last gasp of a Giant Squid. Scientists are stunned. The media descend. As Miles continues to stumble across other oddball findings, including two invasive species that threaten the eco-balance of Puget Sound, a nearby new-age cult’s interest in Miles prompts a headline in USA Today: Kid Messiah? Soon tourists are flocking to the tidal flats, crushing crustaceans underfoot and painting their bodies with black mud. Dodging disingenuous journalists, deluded disciples and the death-throes of his parents’ marriage, Miles tries to recapture some semblance of normality. He reads up on the G-spot and the Kama Sutra to keep pace with his pals’ bull sessions about sex (hilariously contributing “advanced” details that gross the other boys out). But Miles’s aquatic observations cannot be undone, and as summer draws to a close, inhabitants of Puget Sound prepare for a national blitzkrieg of media and scientific attention and the highest tide in 40 years, all of which threatens everything Miles holds dear. On land, the rickety plot could have used some shoring up. Miles is just too resourceful for the reader to believe his happiness—or that of those he loves—is ever at stake. But when Miles is on the water, Lynch’s first novel becomes a stunning light show, both literal, during phosphorescent plankton blooms, and metaphorical, in the poetic fireworks Lynch’s prose sets off as he describes his clearly beloved Puget Sound.
A celebratory song of the sea.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-605-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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by Gary Paulsen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2001
Paulsen recalls personal experiences that he incorporated into Hatchet (1987) and its three sequels, from savage attacks by moose and mosquitoes to watching helplessly as a heart-attack victim dies. As usual, his real adventures are every bit as vivid and hair-raising as those in his fiction, and he relates them with relish—discoursing on “The Fine Art of Wilderness Nutrition,” for instance: “Something that you would never consider eating, something completely repulsive and ugly and disgusting, something so gross it would make you vomit just looking at it, becomes absolutely delicious if you’re starving.” Specific examples follow, to prove that he knows whereof he writes. The author adds incidents from his Iditarod races, describes how he made, then learned to hunt with, bow and arrow, then closes with methods of cooking outdoors sans pots or pans. It’s a patchwork, but an entertaining one, and as likely to win him new fans as to answer questions from his old ones. (Autobiography. 10-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-32650-5
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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