A charming, emotional story about family, fishing, and self-discovery.
A teenage girl in 1967 explores her father’s veiled past in this debut historical novel.
Fifteen-year-old Ida Petrovich worships her dad, a gregarious fisherman who makes a daring crossing every year from their town of Annisport, Washington, to Ketchikan, Alaska. But this year, his boat never returns home; the Coast Guard inform Ida and her mother that he’s “presumed drowned,” and they struggle with accepting that “someone’s dead when there’s no evidence.” Ida overhears a cryptic conversation between her mother and grandmother about her father, in which her mom says “I can’t have a funeral when I’m not even sure he’s dead.” So Ida decides to uncover the truth for herself. After contacting a woman whom his father knew in Ketchikan, she decides to run away from home and work at a cannery there for the summer, in the hopes of finding out more about her dad. Gutting fish for hours on end proves “tiring and monotonous,” but over time, Ida becomes friends with a spirited Tlingit girl named Jody and grows close to Sam Taposok, a Filipino-American boy from her high school who faces daily discrimination. Through it all, Ida grapples with her father’s identity: his affinity for the “scoundrel” raven of Alaskan myth; his personal charisma, which allowed him to create communities beyond his family; and his love for home, coupled with his desire to leave it. McGaffin deftly maps how Ida’s view of her father changes from an idol to a flawed human, as well as the way that grief encroaches on every element of one’s life. Overall, though, her novel is more heartwarming than bleak as it chronicles how the Petrovich women haltingly find ways to survive and plan for an unforeseen future. The relationship between Ida and her mother provides the main dramatic tension; the father’s absence exposes how they used him as an emotional buffer and forces them to communicate their fears. These heart-to-hearts become slightly less believable as the tale winds to a close, and McGaffin ties everything up a bit too neatly. Nevertheless, the story maintains a certain rawness that sustains its impact.
A charming, emotional story about family, fishing, and self-discovery.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943006-81-6
Page Count: 343
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Aspiring filmmaker/first-novelist Chbosky adds an upbeat ending to a tale of teenaged angst—the right combination of realism and uplift to allow it on high school reading lists, though some might object to the sexuality, drinking, and dope-smoking. More sophisticated readers might object to the rip-off of Salinger, though Chbosky pays homage by having his protagonist read Catcher in the Rye. Like Holden, Charlie oozes sincerity, rails against celebrity phoniness, and feels an extraliterary bond with his favorite writers (Harper Lee, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Ayn Rand, etc.). But Charlie’s no rich kid: the third child in a middle-class family, he attends public school in western Pennsylvania, has an older brother who plays football at Penn State, and an older sister who worries about boys a lot. An epistolary novel addressed to an anonymous “friend,” Charlie’s letters cover his first year in high school, a time haunted by the recent suicide of his best friend. Always quick to shed tears, Charlie also feels guilty about the death of his Aunt Helen, a troubled woman who lived with Charlie’s family at the time of her fatal car wreck. Though he begins as a friendless observer, Charlie is soon pals with seniors Patrick and Sam (for Samantha), stepsiblings who include Charlie in their circle, where he smokes pot for the first time, drops acid, and falls madly in love with the inaccessible Sam. His first relationship ends miserably because Charlie remains compulsively honest, though he proves a loyal friend (to Patrick when he’s gay-bashed) and brother (when his sister needs an abortion). Depressed when all his friends prepare for college, Charlie has a catatonic breakdown, which resolves itself neatly and reveals a long-repressed truth about Aunt Helen. A plain-written narrative suggesting that passivity, and thinking too much, lead to confusion and anxiety. Perhaps the folks at (co-publisher) MTV see the synergy here with Daria or any number of videos by the sensitive singer-songwriters they feature.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02734-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: MTV Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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