A compelling contemporary fantasy entwined in historical context that offers a positive message filled with hope.
Through an unlikely relationship, a lonely and emotionally scarred little girl discovers her own strength and a sense of freedom as she learns to shed fear and enjoy life.
Two years after the terrible car crash that killed her parents, Josie Abernathy cannot bear to leave her grandmother’s side, walk to school alone or venture with friends too far from her street. Playing baseball with a couple of boys at the nearby field is the only thing that keeps Josie happy these days, until she meets Sanana, a strange girl from another place. Sanana (rhymes with banana) is mesmerizing and intriguing, pulling Josie into a midnight adventure filled with magic, mystery and some poignant historical significance. Sanana is the ghost of a slave child who was murdered by her plantation owner’s son 150 years ago, somewhere near Josie’s modern-day Georgia home. Josie’s initial hesitation to follow Sanana on an undefined quest is quelled as the two girls quickly develop a spiritual bond. Shelton creates immediate drama and suspense with first-person narration told in Josie’s practical and rational voice as she is drawn to follow this stranger’s increasingly daring requests. She agrees to venture out at night and play baseball, jump aboard and off a moving cargo train, enter a bar in the next town at midnight and search for a Mr. McShane. It all works out for a very good reason, with an outcome that benefits both girls in their need to alleviate shared feelings of parental love and loss. Woven through the second part of the story are bits of American slave history making Sanana’s phantom appearance for Josie all the more tangible. At the same time, themes of friendship and trust interplay as both girls discover a deeper meaning to life and death.
A compelling contemporary fantasy entwined in historical context that offers a positive message filled with hope.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-595-44431-1
Page Count: 90
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
A celebratory song of the sea.
A shrimpy 13-year-old with a super-sized passion for marine life comes of age during a summer of discovery on the tidal flats of Puget Sound.
Miles O’Malley—Squid Boy to his friends—doesn’t mind being short. It’s other things that keep him awake at night, like his parents’ talk of divorce and his increasingly lustful thoughts about the girl next door. Mostly, though, it’s the ocean’s siren call that steals his sleep. During one of his moonlit kayak excursions, Miles comes across the rarest sighting ever documented in the northern Pacific: the last gasp of a Giant Squid. Scientists are stunned. The media descend. As Miles continues to stumble across other oddball findings, including two invasive species that threaten the eco-balance of Puget Sound, a nearby new-age cult’s interest in Miles prompts a headline in USA Today: Kid Messiah? Soon tourists are flocking to the tidal flats, crushing crustaceans underfoot and painting their bodies with black mud. Dodging disingenuous journalists, deluded disciples and the death-throes of his parents’ marriage, Miles tries to recapture some semblance of normality. He reads up on the G-spot and the Kama Sutra to keep pace with his pals’ bull sessions about sex (hilariously contributing “advanced” details that gross the other boys out). But Miles’s aquatic observations cannot be undone, and as summer draws to a close, inhabitants of Puget Sound prepare for a national blitzkrieg of media and scientific attention and the highest tide in 40 years, all of which threatens everything Miles holds dear. On land, the rickety plot could have used some shoring up. Miles is just too resourceful for the reader to believe his happiness—or that of those he loves—is ever at stake. But when Miles is on the water, Lynch’s first novel becomes a stunning light show, both literal, during phosphorescent plankton blooms, and metaphorical, in the poetic fireworks Lynch’s prose sets off as he describes his clearly beloved Puget Sound.
A celebratory song of the sea.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-605-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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