A well-written, if somewhat overambitious, YA tale.
Rowe’s (Creatures of the Lake, 2011, etc.) genre-spanning YA novel features a romance between an ex-track star with a heart problem and a brilliant street artist who hears voices.
Aimee DeLuca used to be an athlete, before a faulty heart valve changed her life. At one point, she went through a short period of being clinically dead; during this time, she saw and spoke to her late grandmother, who urged her to go back to her life. Aimee did, but now she finds herself withdrawing from the world, saddled with unwanted empathic abilities. She looks forward to spending time painting during the summer at an idyllic pond on her great-uncle’s land. There, she meets a teenager named Reizo Rush; she doesn’t know that he’s come to the pond to commit suicide, as he’s desperate to escape the two voices in his head that mock and taunt him. He’s got a reputation as the “Crazy Kid” at school, but no one knows that he’s also a talented graffiti artist, responsible for astonishing works of three-dimensional art around the small Arkansas town. Aimee and Reizo are immediately drawn to each other. As they fall in love, sharing art and secrets, readers are made aware of a mysterious, interactive database called the cloud, and soon find out that the teenage couple is part of a cosmic war that spans lifetimes, involving century-old land disputes, drug dealing, and a mental hospital with a nefarious mission. Rowe’s writing throughout is engaging and assured, and he has a talent for simile: “Nervous laughs erupt around the classroom like heated-up microwave popcorn.” He also avoids the common speculative-fiction pitfall of providing too much exposition, instead letting the enigmatic nature of the cloud draw readers through the pages. Sometimes, however, it feels as if the author is attempting too many genres for one book, including YA romance, real-world mystery, and sci-fi/fantasy.
A well-written, if somewhat overambitious, YA tale.Pub Date: Feb. 27, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Tree Lover Press
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own...
The sturdy Little Blue Truck is back for his third adventure, this time delivering Christmas trees to his band of animal pals.
The truck is decked out for the season with a Christmas wreath that suggests a nose between headlights acting as eyeballs. Little Blue loads up with trees at Toad’s Trees, where five trees are marked with numbered tags. These five trees are counted and arithmetically manipulated in various ways throughout the rhyming story as they are dropped off one by one to Little Blue’s friends. The final tree is reserved for the truck’s own use at his garage home, where he is welcomed back by the tree salestoad in a neatly circular fashion. The last tree is already decorated, and Little Blue gets a surprise along with readers, as tiny lights embedded in the illustrations sparkle for a few seconds when the last page is turned. Though it’s a gimmick, it’s a pleasant surprise, and it fits with the retro atmosphere of the snowy country scenes. The short, rhyming text is accented with colored highlights, red for the animal sounds and bright green for the numerical words in the Christmas-tree countdown.
Little Blue’s fans will enjoy the animal sounds and counting opportunities, but it’s the sparkling lights on the truck’s own tree that will put a twinkle in a toddler’s eyes. (Picture book. 2-5)Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-32041-3
Page Count: 24
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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