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
Cracking page-turner with a multiethnic band of misfits with differing sexual orientations who satisfyingly, believably jell...
Adolescent criminals seek the haul of a lifetime in a fantasyland at the beginning of its industrial age.
The dangerous city of Ketterdam is governed by the Merchant Council, but in reality, large sectors of the city are given over to gangs who run the gambling dens and brothels. The underworld's rising star is 17-year-old Kaz Brekker, known as Dirtyhands for his brutal amorality. Kaz walks with chronic pain from an old injury, but that doesn't stop him from utterly destroying any rivals. When a councilman offers him an unimaginable reward to rescue a kidnapped foreign chemist—30 million kruge!—Kaz knows just the team he needs to assemble. There's Inej, an itinerant acrobat captured by slavers and sold to a brothel, now a spy for Kaz; the Grisha Nina, with the magical ability to calm and heal; Matthias the zealot, hunter of Grishas and caught in a hopeless spiral of love and vengeance with Nina; Wylan, the privileged boy with an engineer's skills; and Jesper, a sharpshooter who keeps flirting with Wylan. Bardugo broadens the universe she created in the Grisha Trilogy, sending her protagonists around countries that resemble post-Renaissance northern Europe, where technology develops in concert with the magic that's both coveted and despised. It’s a highly successful venture, leaving enough open questions to cause readers to eagerly await Volume 2.
Cracking page-turner with a multiethnic band of misfits with differing sexual orientations who satisfyingly, believably jell into a family . (Fantasy. 14 & up)Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62779-212-7
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK TO SCREEN
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