Memorable, if sometimes ham-fisted.
Two teens fall for one another amid an extreme sport and an extremist plot in Withers and Hayat’s YA novel.
Sixteen-year-old Bronte Miller has returned to her hometown of Richland, Washington, after a year in Egypt. She misses her life in Alexandria, including her romance with Sarfraz, a boy from the Parkour Academy whom she kept secret from her parents. Richland is boring in comparison, at least until Yemeni refugee Karam Saif comes to town. Karam is an outsider in every way, but he and Bronte share two things in common: Bronte’s father is a journalist currently covering the war in Yemen, and they have a mutual love of the sport of parkour. Parkour—an activity that involves running, jumping, and climbing over obstacles—is popular at Bronte’s high school. There’s even a parkour club, run by the new computer teacher from France, Julian Legendre. Bronte soon develops feelings for Karam. It isn’t long, though, before suspicions between the Muslim and non-Muslim communities in Richland boil into an extremist recruitment controversy involving both teens—along with Bronte’s father and the parkour club itself! Withers and Hayat write in apt, punchy prose: “One by one, starting on the floor, we throw ourselves against the poles, sometimes bashing our poor bodies against them, mostly sliding right off like the metal is greased. But gradually, a few of us start getting it—sticking one out of five times, one out of four times.” The premise of the novel is somewhat hard to believe: Nearly every character, no matter where they are from, happens to love parkour? Really? Once the reader gets past that, the book reveals itself to be about American fears and misunderstandings of Islam and the Arab world…even if those fears and misunderstandings crop up in ways that are very on-the-nose. Bronte is perhaps a bit too angst-y, Karam a bit too idealized, and Legendre a bit too unbelievable, but fans of big, unsubtle YA sports novels will likely enjoy this intriguing blend of parkour, cross-cultural understanding, and teen romance.
Memorable, if sometimes ham-fisted.Pub Date: April 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-9959103-2-4
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Raw, delicate, and deeply caring.
When Death-Cast doesn’t call, fate intertwines the lives of two boys, both haunted by their pasts and with futures they can’t escape.
In this third installment of the series that opened with 2017’s They Both Die at the End, Paz Dario waits every night for Death-Cast to call—as it should have for his father nearly 10 years ago, when Paz shot him to save his mother’s life. But the call never comes. Death-Cast killed Paz’s dreams of an acting career: No one will hire him now because the world sees him as a villain. When Paz tries (not for the first time) to put an end to his suffering, an unexpected encounter with Alano Rosa, the heir of Death-Cast, stops him. Both in a place of desperation, Alano and Paz sign a contract to live for Begin Days instead of waiting for their End Days. As suspenseful and emotionally wrenching as the previous titles in the series, this new installment explores heavy themes of abuse, mental health, self-harm, and suicide. Paz grapples with a recent diagnosis of borderline personality disorder. Silvera surrounds Alano and Paz with a web of complex relationships. Although the protagonists fall fast for one another and form a deep connection over Alano’s desire to support Paz, Silvera emphasizes the importance of professional help. Both Alano and Paz have Puerto Rican heritage. The cliffhanger ending promises more to come.
Raw, delicate, and deeply caring. (content warning, resources) (Speculative fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780063240858
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
A humdinger of a cliffhanger will leave readers clamoring for volume three.
In the sequel to the hugely popular The Hunger Games (2008), Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark, having won the annual Games, are now rich and famous—and trapped in the fiction that they are lovers. They are seen as a threat to the Capitol, their unusual manner of winning an act of rebellion that could inspire uprisings throughout Panem. Knowing her life is in danger, Katniss considers escaping with her family and friends but instead reluctantly assumes the role of a rebel, almost forced into it by threats from the insidious President Snow.
Beyond the expert world building, the acute social commentary and the large cast of fully realized characters, there’s action, intrigue, romance and some amount of hope in a story readers will find completely engrossing. Collins weaves in enough background for this novel to stand alone, but it will be a far richer experience for those who have read the first installment and come to love Katniss, Peeta, Haymitch and the rest of the desperate residents of this dystopia.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-439-02349-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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