Though he’s president of his class now, Riverdale High’s Kevin Keller was a middle school mess.
Setting up for the prom with Veronica and Jughead prompts Kevin, Archie’s popular gay friend, to recount events surrounding his first prom back at Medford Middle School. Always the new kid, Army brat Kevin is chubby, zitty and brace-faced. He doesn’t know he’s gay, but he is a happy member of the comics-and-video-game–loving Geek Squad. With his three friends, he dodges school bully Elliot and tries to hang out with handsome swim-team captain Timmy. As the prom approaches, Elliot steps up bullying of classmate Luke, Timmy ignores the Squad, and friend Sammie (Samantha) wants more of a relationship than Kevin is ready for. Suddenly, Kevin’s square in Elliot’s sights. It turns out to be quite a night! Kupperberg offers a text-only back story on popular Archie Comics character Kevin Keller. There’s nothing particularly literary about it, but fans will enjoy and others may be prompted to pick up Kevin’s comic-book adventures. Kevin’s inner life is realistic, and the attempt to keep the perpetual teens of Riverdale current is commendable. However, technology and social issues in Riverdale still feel a bit like sunglasses on a cat.
A bubble-gum problem novel for gay preteens which may be innovation enough to warrant purchase. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-448-45852-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2013
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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Parallel storylines take readers through the lives of two young people on Sept. 11 in 2001 and 2019.
In the contemporary timeline, Reshmina is an Afghan girl living in foothills near the Pakistan border that are a battleground between the Taliban and U.S. armed forces. She is keen to improve her English while her twin brother, Pasoon, is inspired by the Taliban and wants to avenge their older sister, killed by an American bomb on her wedding day. Reshmina helps a wounded American soldier, making her village a Taliban target. In 2001, Brandon Chavez is spending the day with his father, who works at the World Trade Center’s Windows on the World restaurant. Brandon is heading to the underground mall when a plane piloted by al-Qaida hits the tower, and his father is among those killed. The two storylines develop in parallel through alternating chapters. Gratz’s deeply moving writing paints vivid images of the loss and fear of those who lived through the trauma of 9/11. However, this nuance doesn’t extend to the Afghan characters; Reshmina and Pasoon feel one-dimensional. Descriptions of the Taliban’s Afghan victims and Reshmina's gentle father notwithstanding, references to all young men eventually joining the Taliban and Pasoon's zeal for their cause counteract this messaging. Explanations for the U.S. military invasion of Afghanistan in the author’s note and in characters’ conversations too simplistically present the U.S. presence.
Falters in its oversimplified portrayal of a complicated region and people. (author’s note) (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-24575-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
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The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction (Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction—a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.
Five years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her; the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter; later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here; like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events—but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 1, 1989
ISBN: 0547577095
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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