An entertaining, well-told love story/drama.
Complications arise in this YA novel when a brilliant teenage coder’s anonymous sex education blog goes viral and a friendship becomes romantic.
Amber Henderson is a senior at private Wilmont Academy—possibly “the last non-religious school on the planet still operating under the abstinence only policy.” Because plenty of kids are having sex anyway, they really need some good advice, such as how to obtain reliable birth control. Amber can rely on her sex-positive parents, but she’d love to help the less fortunate. She and Dean Winters vie for the title of the school’s most talented coder, so when he proposes a bet (for bragging rights and a deadmau5 T-shirt) to get under Principal Tanner’s skin via hacking, Amber has a perfect idea. She’ll set up an untraceable sex advice blog on the darknet, making sure everyone knows it’s written by a Wilmont student, and help information-starved students while riling Tanner. Though Amber and Dean are both hot as well as gifted and share much in common, she considers him out of her league; she’s also tormented by memories of a bad encounter with her ex-boyfriend. The coders’ growing relationship is put sorely to the test when Tanner blackmails Dean into uncovering who’s behind the increasingly popular blog. Lee (Love Beyond Opposites, 2018, etc.) sets up a classic confrontation between cool kids and an uptight administrator: They’re smart, funny, and gorgeous while he’s venal, underhanded, and vindictive. The point of view alternates between Amber and Dean, each voice distinctive but both capturing a true teenage feel. Their developing romance is sweet and sizzling, with a lot of sensitivity toward Amber’s fears. That Dean can’t figure out the identity of the advice-giver is somewhat contrived as an obstacle given that he and Amber are the only two members of the Code Club. Another tip-off is that Amber’s mother writes erotica and her father is a teen psychologist. The emotions can become melodramatically overwrought, and both main characters are altogether a bit too flawless, especially in looks. Still, it’s an engaging novel that nicely illuminates the coder subculture and deals honestly with teenage sexuality.
An entertaining, well-told love story/drama.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64063-658-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Entangled Teen
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Aspiring filmmaker/first-novelist Chbosky adds an upbeat ending to a tale of teenaged angst—the right combination of realism and uplift to allow it on high school reading lists, though some might object to the sexuality, drinking, and dope-smoking. More sophisticated readers might object to the rip-off of Salinger, though Chbosky pays homage by having his protagonist read Catcher in the Rye. Like Holden, Charlie oozes sincerity, rails against celebrity phoniness, and feels an extraliterary bond with his favorite writers (Harper Lee, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Ayn Rand, etc.). But Charlie’s no rich kid: the third child in a middle-class family, he attends public school in western Pennsylvania, has an older brother who plays football at Penn State, and an older sister who worries about boys a lot. An epistolary novel addressed to an anonymous “friend,” Charlie’s letters cover his first year in high school, a time haunted by the recent suicide of his best friend. Always quick to shed tears, Charlie also feels guilty about the death of his Aunt Helen, a troubled woman who lived with Charlie’s family at the time of her fatal car wreck. Though he begins as a friendless observer, Charlie is soon pals with seniors Patrick and Sam (for Samantha), stepsiblings who include Charlie in their circle, where he smokes pot for the first time, drops acid, and falls madly in love with the inaccessible Sam. His first relationship ends miserably because Charlie remains compulsively honest, though he proves a loyal friend (to Patrick when he’s gay-bashed) and brother (when his sister needs an abortion). Depressed when all his friends prepare for college, Charlie has a catatonic breakdown, which resolves itself neatly and reveals a long-repressed truth about Aunt Helen. A plain-written narrative suggesting that passivity, and thinking too much, lead to confusion and anxiety. Perhaps the folks at (co-publisher) MTV see the synergy here with Daria or any number of videos by the sensitive singer-songwriters they feature.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02734-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: MTV Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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