An immersive teen adventure as big and eclectic as a Staten Island landfill.
A group of teens stumbles across a criminal enterprise centered around their neighborhood dump in Gupta’s debut YA novel.
Staten Island, 1998: The neighborhood of Travis is home to Fresh Kills Landfill, the main dumping ground for New York City’s trash—among other things. For kids like Raj Patel, it’s a spot to be avoided, a place “of luminescent rivers, dog-sized rats, and rabid turkey vultures,” to say nothing of its connections to the local mafia family. Raj has enough on his plate without worrying about Fresh Kills—the high schooler runs his own lucrative business burning bootleg CDs for his classmates. He uses the money to help out his Polish American mom, who’s been forced to pull double shifts as a nurse’s aide at an eldercare facility ever since his Indian father split for Florida two years ago. On the night following his final day of freshman year, Raj, a new Mississippi transplant named Georgia, and Raj’s friends—known throughout the neighborhood as the Victory Boys—accidentally stumble across a murder-in-progress in the middle of the landfill. They manage to disrupt the proceedings (sort of), but now they have mobsters on their tails. If they want to get out of this quagmire with their lives, Raj and his buddies will have to confront the long-ignored garbage rotting in the heart of their town. Gupta evokes the time and place with sharp details and plenty of wit, particularly regarding the dump itself. “My science teacher never tired of reminding us that the only man-made structures visible from space were the Great Wall of China and the Fresh Kills landfill,” narrates Raj. “As far as we were concerned, those two were comparable—monuments to humanity’s limitless potential.” While the premise of a group of teens uncovering a mystery is well-trod territory, Gupta delivers on both sides of the equation: Raj and his friends—who include a pair of stoners called Deadbolt and Cheetah—are charmingly specific and memorably rendered, as is Travis’s multiethnic underworld.
An immersive teen adventure as big and eclectic as a Staten Island landfill.Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9798886453133
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A descriptive and atmospheric paranormal social thriller that could be a bit tighter.
After a Nigerian British girl goes off to an exclusive boarding school that seems to prey on less-privileged students, she discovers there might be some truth behind an urban legend.
Ife Adebola joins the Urban Achievers scholarship program at pricey, high-pressure Nithercott School, arriving shortly after a student called Leon mysteriously disappeared. Gossip says he’s a victim of the glowing-eyed Changing Man who targets the lonely, leaving them changed. Ife doesn’t believe in the myth, but amid the stresses of Nithercott’s competitive, privileged, majority-white environment, where she is constantly reminded of her state school background, she does miss her friends and family. When Malika, a fellow Black scholarship student, disappears and then returns, acting strangely devoid of personality, Ife worries the Changing Man is real—and that she’s next. Ife joins forces with classmate Bijal and Benny, Leon’s younger brother, to uncover the truth about who the Changing Man is and what he wants. Culminating in a detailed, gory, and extended climactic battle, this verbose thriller tempts readers with a nefarious mystery involving racial and class-based violence but never quite lives up to its potential and peters out thematically by its explosive finale. However, this debut offers highly visually evocative and eerie descriptions of characters and events and will appeal to fans of creature horror, social commentary, and dark academia.
A descriptive and atmospheric paranormal social thriller that could be a bit tighter. (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781250868138
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
A gripping tribute to resilience.
A girl with amnesia and a boy suspected of harming his girlfriend overcome adversity to find the answers they seek.
A 17-year-old girl wakes up in a ditch, disoriented and with no memory of who she is or what happened. Found by the Alton, Oregon, police, she is brought to the station. Soon after, Wayne Boone, a man claiming to be her father, shows up. He has photos of her on his phone and her high school ID card, with the name Mary Boone. Wayne convinces the police to release Mary into his custody. The more time Mary spends with Wayne, however, the weirder things get: He’s unaware of her food allergy, and as her memories start to return, they don’t conform with Wayne’s versions of her life. In the town of Washington City, across the Willamette River, Drew is in a bad place. His girlfriend, Lola, has disappeared, and Drew was the last person to see her. His adoptive dads and cousin are the only ones who support him; everyone else, including the sheriff, thinks he’s responsible for Lola’s disappearance. Intent on finding Lola, Drew finds help in an unlikely ally, Lola’s best friend, Autumn, who is the sheriff’s daughter. But will they find Lola in time? The two immersive storylines bring to life the trials and frustrations each main character faces in this debut, which is a thrilling delight right up to the unexpected and bittersweet conclusion. Most characters are cued white; one of Drew’s dads is Guatemalan.
A gripping tribute to resilience. (Thriller. 14-18)Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2023
ISBN: 9781728270111
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
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