Kindl, who brought readers the perfectly droll Owl in Love (1993) and the magically metaphoric Woman in the Wall (1997), this time offers a winsome and wickedly funny fairytale fractured in multiple places. Taking elements freely from a handful—at least—of familiar fairytales, she's made one of energy and spirit and no small amount of high hilarity. When the tale opens, the Goose Girl, the narrator, is stuck in a tower, kept prisoner because she doesn't like her prospective marital choices. The Prince is sweet but dim; and the King is wicked and blackhearted. The Goose Girl, whose name is actually Alexandria Aurora Fortunato, has been blessed with a number of attributes that could be useful: her tears are diamonds, and when she combs her hair, gold dust falls from it. But, she finds this all to be a pain, and she suspects the royal men's interest in her stems from her profitability. She escapes the tower because her 12 geese rescue her, and she continues to have adventures fending off ogresses (one with two heads) and escaping from capture and imprisonment, alone as well as with the feckless prince, whose heart has led him in search of her and whose mouth gets them in deeper trouble with great regularity. The geese pop up regularly, too, and Alexandria's golden hair has a recurring role as an escape tool. When true love blossoms, the Goose Girl is found to be royal, and her geese freed to be her sisters once again, readers will rejoice. Running the gamut from quiet chuckles to laugh-out-loud guffaws, this promises delight in great profusion to generations of readers now and to come. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-03377-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember.
Kai’s life is upended when his coastal village is devastated in Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami in this verse novel from an author who experienced them firsthand.
With his single mother, her parents, and his friend Ryu among the thousands missing or dead, biracial Kai, 17, is dazed and disoriented. His friend Shin’s supportive, but his intact family reminds Kai, whose American dad has been out of touch for years, of his loss. Kai’s isolation is amplified by his uncertain cultural status. Playing soccer and his growing friendship with shy Keiko barely lessen his despair. Then he’s invited to join a group of Japanese teens traveling to New York to meet others who as teenagers lost parents in the 9/11 attacks a decade earlier. Though at first reluctant, Kai agrees to go and, in the process, begins to imagine a future. Like graphic novels, today’s spare novels in verse (the subgenre concerning disasters especially) are significantly shaped by what’s left out. Lacking art’s visceral power to grab attention, verse novels may—as here—feel sparsely plotted with underdeveloped characters portrayed from a distance in elegiac monotone. Kai’s a generic figure, a coat hanger for the disaster’s main event, his victories mostly unearned; in striking contrast, his rural Japanese community and how they endure catastrophe and overwhelming losses—what they do and don’t do for one another, comforts they miss, kindnesses they value—spring to life.
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember. (author preface, afterword) (Verse fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-53474-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
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
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