Light on mystery, but an enjoyable cast enlivens this meddling-kids story.
In this debut YA novel, a tween detective investigates the case of an illegal quarry and a corrupt sheriff in her new hometown.
At age 12, chocolate-skinned Natalie Jasmine Hill wants “to help change this world.” A year ago, when she lived in New Jersey, she solved the case of a drug theft from the hospital where her mother, Lauren, worked. A local paper called her a “kid detective,” and the reputation has followed her to Pembrooke, Maryland. She and her mother recently moved there to be closer to family after Natalie’s father, a pilot, was ruled missing along with his crew when their plane disappeared during a United Nations mission in northern Iraq. Pembrooke is a pretty town, and Natalie already has a good friend, Vivian Chin, and a comrade in Aaron Jenkins, her high school-age cousin. Pembrooke’s only flaw, says Lauren, is Sheriff Richard Anderson—and very soon, it becomes evident that something fishy is going on with the town quarry. Supposedly, it was closed for safety violations, but there have been suspicious accidents and injuries linked to quarry trucks. Natalie decides she needs photographs to prove that the quarry is still operating, and investigates with the help of her friends, incurring the sheriff’s wrath; luckily, she’s got allies like the local newspaper publisher on her side. Changing the world is a tall order, but maybe the group can change Pembrooke for the better. In her novel, former journalist Fields offers a pleasing juvenile detective story that’s especially notable for featuring a diverse cast (including Jenny Merryweather, the African-American publisher), rare in this genre. The heroine’s determination and drive are admirable; overall, the dialogue and relationships between the characters are naturalistic. But besides a subplot regarding Natalie’s overanxious science teacher, the story is a bit thin. Get photos, publish them, and try to nail down the sheriff’s involvement—that’s all there is to it, drawn out through repetitive conversations and plans to accomplish these things and various progress reports. Distracting tense shifts could also use some tweaking (“No one noticed he’d joined their huddle. Bobby is often overlooked. He is a year younger than Mark”).
Light on mystery, but an enjoyable cast enlivens this meddling-kids story.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-578-19214-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Chiang Mai Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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