Resplendent with Anderson’s trademark dry, sarcastic wit, this brief, complicated read serves as a scathing social...
Humans inhabit the bottom echelons in this brief satirical novel of alien invasion that envisions a scenario more whimper than bang.
Adam, a talented artist, lives with his mother and sister after his father abandons the family. When the 1950s-culture–obsessed vuvv landed years before, people were taken in by their promises to supply advanced technology and medicine, not understanding that they’d soon be obsolete, impoverished, and, like Adam, who suffers from a debilitating intestinal illness, without any means to pay for medical care. In short vignettes titled as if they are pieces of fine art, the bleakness of this new reality is expertly rendered—as in an early chapter in which his mother is roughed up by a fellow job seeker who threatens to burn her “motherfucking house down” if she persists in applying for the same part-time position. When they decide to rent out part of their house to another family, Adam and their daughter, Chloe, fall for each other. Monetizing their connection by broadcasting their 1950s-styled romance for the vuvv becomes mightily complicated when the relationship sours. The ethnicities of the main characters are not specified—the only time race is textually indicated is a passage where white people are shown rioting on television and blaming Mexican workers for stealing their jobs—but references to European art and the way Adam and Chloe slide into a clichéd movie vision of the 1950s both imply they are white and add further layers of interpretive complexity to the book.
Resplendent with Anderson’s trademark dry, sarcastic wit, this brief, complicated read serves as a scathing social commentary and, as the title indicates, an interrogation of free market economics. (Science fiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-7636-8789-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Compelling relationships and characters dazzle like a quinceañera tiara.
Being a professional princess isn’t as glamorous as it’s cracked up to be.
Carmen Aguilar’s summer job is the only thing standing between her and the last credit she needs to graduate from high school. Working as a princess for hire at children’s birthday parties in Miami is grueling—and goes from bad to worse when Carmen’s ex-flame, Mauro Reyes, is hired to play the Beast to her Belle. Overwhelming awkwardness and the temptation to rehash the downfall of their relationship has Carmen on the brink of quitting when the whole company is hired to work the quinceañera of someone with whom Carmen is all too familiar: Ariana, her dramatic and entitled cousin. After a major falling out almost four years ago, the cousins and their families have barely spoken. The tías are hoping that this quince will mend their family ties and bring them back together permanently, but Carmen can barely stand to be in the same room as Ariana, let alone tolerate the months of rehearsals required for the big day. Tempers fly, old wounds are reopened, and romance is in the air as this princess endures complex family dynamics and the infuriating attention of her very own Prince Charming. Characters are well developed and dialogue crackles in this energetic tale. Carmen is Cuban and Puerto Rican, and many other characters are Latinx.
Compelling relationships and characters dazzle like a quinceañera tiara. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-299683-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: HarperTeen
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
Painful yet compulsively readable.
A white teen living a sheltered life seeks to break her rock-star mother out of the cycle of abuse perpetrated on their family.
Sixteen-year-old Jane lives in a large, old Victorian house with younger brother Henry, father Vernon, their cook, their gardener—and Mina, her mother, who, when she’s not out on tour with her world-famous punk band, Placenta, is confined by Vernon to a system of pneumatic tubes that traverse their house. Ever since the onset of the global pandemic over four years ago, Jane and Henry haven’t been allowed to return to school, instead receiving a bizarre regimen of home-school instruction from Vernon, while Mina watches on helplessly from her capsule in the tubes. Only when Jane stumbles on a cache of home movies—actually security camera footage from around their house dating back to her parents’ courtship days—does she begin to gain some perspective on her dysfunctional, abusive family life. In secret, she starts composing a punk opera to express her desire to save her mother from the life she seems trapped in. When Mina leaves to go on tour for Placenta’s latest album, Jane uses her wits to mount a nascent, persistent rebellion against Vernon’s toxic grip on their family’s psyche. Expertly blending fabulism with hard realism and Victorian language with contemporary teen-speak, this powerful narrative examines the myriad effects of emotional and physical abuse on a family.
Painful yet compulsively readable. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780593353974
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2024
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