Still, this novel, with its solid message about finding courage through adversity, should resonate with teens who feel...
Dance becomes him.
After his half-Turkish father’s death, Johnny Emin, a 13-year-old British boy, feels like an outsider in his own life. Uprooted from his family’s house to a small flat in London, Johnny endures constant bullying from the Populars at his new school, who nickname him Swan Boy, and becomes the caretaker for his 5-year-old brother, Mojo, while their white mother struggles to make ends meet. With no friends and no one with whom to share his grief, Johnny is totally isolated until a series of encounters with a majestic swan result in his sprouting actual feathers and discovering a new sense of agency. Through a series of misadventures, Johnny is unexpectedly cast as Prince Siegfried in the school’s dance production of Swan Lake and must decide whether he has the courage to embrace his uniqueness despite what others may think. Sheehan’s second novel, which is part grief narrative, part anti-bullying/self-empowerment story, and part fantasy, addresses so many themes that it gets mired in its own good intentions. While Johnny’s anger at his father’s death is nicely rendered, the fantasy elements might have been better left as metaphor, since Johnny’s literal transformation detracts from the notion that dance is really what liberates him.
Still, this novel, with its solid message about finding courage through adversity, should resonate with teens who feel isolated. (Magical realism. 11-16)Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78074-924-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Rock the Boat/Oneworld
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Hard battles form this satisfying novel’s throughline, some fought in the open but most won or lost in the heart.
As if weathering adolescence weren’t hard enough, war casts Fing into further maelstroms of terror and heartbreak in this sequel to Nine Open Arms (2014).
As a narrator, Josephine “Fing” Boon makes a particularly sharp-tongued, angry, and naïve observer of events. It’s hard to blame her for coming across as unlikable. The series of scourges she endures begins with having to leave school to take a job as hired companion to Liesl—a demanding, manipulative, and deeply traumatized child in the household of the Dutch town’s wealthy Cigar Emperor and his German wife, called, in the region’s Limburgish slang, the Pruusin. It continues with the departure of her first boyfriend, who returns a Nazi-sympathizing Blackshirt, and the unexpected arrival of what she deems her “Red Flood.” It escalates through the German occupation, increasing hardships, a devastating family breakup, and the rescue of one of her two sisters from being bundled aboard a train with a group of Jewish deportees…including, shockingly, the Pruusin. As the absorbingly complex narrative progresses, Fing isn’t the only character in the white-default cast apt to leave readers with conflicted sympathies. Coming almost as a relief, the emotional bombshells ultimately culminate in an air raid’s physical one that leaves Fing and readers poised with no end in sight.
Hard battles form this satisfying novel’s throughline, some fought in the open but most won or lost in the heart. (cast list, glossaries) (Historical fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-59270-269-5
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Enchanted Lion Books
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
No sex or drugs—but plenty of live, heady rock-’n’-roll.
Two teenagers take a road trip—searching for a fugitive family member and finding…America.
It’s June 1969. Hints that her estranged but beloved big brother, Barry, has fetched up in San Francisco prompt 14-year-old Molly to enlist their fledgling-drummer cousin, Norman, 17, as driver and (with the collusion of their newly liberated moms) head west from Charleston in an old school bus. Quickly turning into anything but a straight run, the journey plunges the naïve but resilient travelers into a succession of youth-culture hot spots from Atlanta’s funky Strip to a commune in New Mexico, with stops at renowned recording studios and live-music venues. Wiles opens and closes this musically and culturally immersive road trip with extensive montages of period news photos, quotes, headlines, and lyrics, scatters smaller documentary sheaves throughout, and enriches the song titles at each chapter head with production notes. The glittering supporting cast includes famed session musician Hal Blaine, Duane Allman, Elvis, and Wavy Gravy. While leaving the era’s more-conservative, racist majority visible but at a remove from her white protagonists, the author introduces them to an interracial couple with a baby and a same-sex couple of Vietnam vets. In the end, Barry’s fate takes on minor significance next to the profound changes the trip has wrought on their hearts and minds.
No sex or drugs—but plenty of live, heady rock-’n’-roll. (author’s note, timeline, several bibliographies) (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-545-10609-2
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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