Shusterman (The Eye of Kid Midas, 1992, etc.) turns the pitfalls of adolescence into a landscape of nightmares, demonstrating that anyone can become a hero just by confronting old fears. Each of the six teenagers in this novel are misfits, suffering from deformities the author mines from the depths of teenage angst: Lourdes is so obese she develops her own gravitational field; Tory is scarred by rampant acne; Dillon is driven to wreck things; Michael lives in a state of frantic, insatiable sexual arousal, etc. More disturbing is the realization that unless they discover the reason for their freakish problems, they will eventually be destroyed by them. The dramatic finale where the six confront their personal demons is more disturbing and satisfying than the infamous prom scene from Stephen King's Carrie (1975). In fact, the evocation of epic scenes demands big-screen treatment. Shusterman's dead-on portrayal of teenage phobias and his engaging, sympathetic characters combine in a haunting but ultimately reassuring novel. (Fiction. 12+)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-85506-0
Page Count: 191
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1995
Decades after the events of The Forest of Hands and Teeth (2009), teenager Gabry lives in relative safety. Despite the Barrier keeping the ravaging zombies out of town, Gabry is a terrified homebody who wants only to stay sheltered with her mother, the refugee heroine of Forest. Her nervousness is justified; when Gabry is peer-pressured into sneaking past the Barrier for a night of adolescent rebellion, several of her friends are zombified. (One wonders, if teens sneaking out for a snog is so dangerous to society, how there any humans left at all.) The ensuing chaos sends Gabry into the wilderness where, encumbered by revelations about love and family, she encounters zombie-worshiping cultists, the dangerous remnants of the army and her own past. Whatever comes between Gabry and her mother, there’s one thing they definitely have in common: Like her mother, Gabry experiences an angst-ridden, gloomy love triangle while fleeing from zombie hordes in the forest’s depths. Fast-paced despite the mawkish romance, it will be gobbled up by fans of the first volume like brains. (Horror. 12-14)
Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 970-0-385-73684-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Karr (The Cave, 1994, etc.) chooses the silent film studios during WW I as a backdrop for twin adolescent film stars Fitzhugh and Nelly Dalton's discovery of a ring of German sympathizers. Although their father's suspicious death in the explosion of a munitions dump has forced the twins and their mother to move out of Manhattan, things are looking up for the scrappy family. Fitzhugh and Nelly will star in a new film serial, In the Kaiser's Clutch, written and sold to the studio by their mother. The twins eventually uncover their leading man as the brains behind a secret German bomb factory. By juxtaposing plot summaries of each serial installment at the opening of every chapter and then describing all the hard work that goes into the segments, Karr accurately recreates the early film industry, and those who can give themselves up wholeheartedly to some of the campier aspects of this will have a ball. The plot is stuffed with cornball jokes, wooden dialogue, and clichÇd happy family scenes; the German characters are reduced to thick-accented, shifty-eyed, bravado-spouting villains, and the novel ultimately becomes as jingoistic as the fictional serial at its core. (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1995
ISBN: 0-374-33638-5
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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