A captivating story about seeking and exposing the truth.
Fifteen-year-old British Pakistani Dua Iqbal is a passionate student journalist and determined truth-teller.
While Bodley High is undergoing construction, Dua and other Year Elevens are attending Minerva College, located in a wealthier part of town where the majority of students are White. At Minerva, Dua experiences Islamophobia and microaggressions, such as being called by another hijabi’s name in class. Meanwhile, Bodley students are subjected to harsher disciplinary treatment even as Minerva students’ transgressions are overlooked. Dua is also worried about her chemistry teacher mum, whose mental health is deteriorating, and working on her relationship with her dad, the owner of a comic-book shop. Her parents are divorced, and her mother was disowned for marrying a man from a lower caste. When she isn’t chosen for a position on the Minerva Chronicle, Dua and Liam, her White best mate, persuade Bodley principal Mohamud Aden, who is Somali, to let them create a paper focusing on Bodley students’ experiences. When it gets shut down by Mr. Aden after publishing controversial exposés about those in power, Dua and her team start an anonymous online paper. Throughout the book, Dua discovers a lot about herself—growing, changing, and mending relationships—and doesn’t back down even after receiving a vicious death threat. Khan’s gripping novel, with its upbeat and aspirational resolution, focuses on privilege, corruption, and power, interweaving details about Dua’s and her classmates’ family dynamics, relationships, and socio-economic situations.
A captivating story about seeking and exposing the truth. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: June 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5290-2994-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
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
A beautiful meditation on the tender, fraught interior lives of Black boys.
The acclaimed author of Between the World and Me (2015) reflects on the family and community that shaped him in this adaptation of his 2008 adult memoir of the same name.
Growing up in Baltimore in the ’80s, Coates was a dreamer, all “cupcakes and comic books at the core.” He was also heavily influenced by “the New York noise” of mid-to-late-1980s hip-hop. Not surprisingly then, his prose takes on an infectious hip-hop poetic–meets–medieval folklore aesthetic, as in this description of his neighborhood’s crew: “Walbrook Junction ran everything, until they met North and Pulaski, who, craven and honorless, would punk you right in front of your girl.” But it is Coates’ father—a former Black Panther and Afrocentric publisher—who looms largest in his journey to manhood. In a community where their peers were fatherless, Coates and his six siblings viewed their father as flawed but with the “aura of a prophet.” He understood how Black boys could get caught in the “crosshairs of the world” and was determined to save his. Coates revisits his relationships with his father, his swaggering older brother, and his peers. The result will draw in young adult readers while retaining all of the heart of the original.
A beautiful meditation on the tender, fraught interior lives of Black boys. (maps, family tree) (Memoir. 14-18)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984894-03-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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