A smart, riveting environmental tale with a laudable adolescent cast.
In this debut middle-grade novel, a teenage girl fights an environmentally destructive development in her hometown, where a werewolf roams.
Thirteen-year-old Emma Murry loves nature and animals. She and her best friend, Sophie, are proud members of their middle school’s Environmental Club in Black Mountain, North Carolina, a place renowned for its monarch butterfly population. So they, like other locals, are horrified by the news that a ski resort is in the works. Its environmental impact will be devastating, starting with tearing down the community’s monarch butterfly garden. Some Black Mountain residents support the development, seeing it as an economic boost. The girls brainstorm ways to protest, and even act on some of them, before learning that action movie star of yesteryear Chester Scott is the one planning the resort; Emma’s been crushing on Chester’s teen son Jeb via Instagram. She forces herself to look past Jeb’s indisputable cuteness and sells him on Black Mountain’s natural beauty, hoping the boy can change his father’s mind. But when they discover a bizarre set of paw prints, Emma and Jeb become convinced that there’s a werewolf on the loose. Identifying the lycanthrope gives Emma another great excuse to spend time with Jeb and, while she’s at it, try to scare the resort developers away. There’s not much time, as the zoning meeting to greenlight the project takes place in only a week. It’s an uphill battle for Emma, but she knows her beloved environment is worth it.
Rebecca Laxton delivers a diverting, environment-friendly mystery. The werewolf subplot focuses more on investigation than scares; Emma first has to prove that a werewolf even exists before identifying its human counterpart. Further engaging plot threads emerge from the narrative as well, including a death threat against Chester, a wrongfully accused townsperson, and a character who turns up missing in the final act. Emma is an appealing young hero who shares a subtle romance with Jeb. She quickly sees him as more than a social media idol; the two connect over their love of skateboarding and their utter belief in the existence of a legendary shape-shifting creature. At the same time, there’s potential trouble between Emma and Sophie. Sophie doesn’t hide her animosity toward Jeb, and her perpetual negativity spoils some of the book’s lightheartedness. Descriptions are colorful; Emma, a painter, equates people’s traits with soothing hues (e.g., “buttery yellow”). Rebecca Laxton’s prose, meanwhile, engages multiple senses: “At lunchtime, the crowd flocked to the restaurants. The street smelled like hot bread, tangy oregano, and warm tomato sauce, making my stomach rumble.” There’s educational value, too, as Emma not only praises nature, but also notes for Jeb (and readers) things that harm the environment. Gracie Laxton’s black-and-white minimalist artwork prefaces each chapter. These unembellished illustrations and silhouettes leave lasting impressions of such things as a howling wolf and a wheels-up skateboard.
A smart, riveting environmental tale with a laudable adolescent cast.Pub Date: March 28, 2023
ISBN: 9781960146229
Page Count: 244
Publisher: Warren Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.
Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as told from the perspective of a more resourceful and contemplative Jim than the one you remember.
This isn’t the first novel to reimagine Twain’s 1885 masterpiece, but the audacious and prolific Everett dives into the very heart of Twain’s epochal odyssey, shifting the central viewpoint from that of the unschooled, often credulous, but basically good-hearted Huck to the more enigmatic and heroic Jim, the Black slave with whom the boy escapes via raft on the Mississippi River. As in the original, the threat of Jim’s being sold “down the river” and separated from his wife and daughter compels him to run away while figuring out what to do next. He's soon joined by Huck, who has faked his own death to get away from an abusive father, ramping up Jim’s panic. “Huck was supposedly murdered and I’d just run away,” Jim thinks. “Who did I think they would suspect of the heinous crime?” That Jim can, as he puts it, “[do] the math” on his predicament suggests how different Everett’s version is from Twain’s. First and foremost, there's the matter of the Black dialect Twain used to depict the speech of Jim and other Black characters—which, for many contemporary readers, hinders their enjoyment of his novel. In Everett’s telling, the dialect is a put-on, a manner of concealment, and a tactic for survival. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” Jim explains. He also discloses that, in violation of custom and law, he learned to read the books in Judge Thatcher’s library, including Voltaire and John Locke, both of whom, in dreams and delirium, Jim finds himself debating about human rights and his own humanity. With and without Huck, Jim undergoes dangerous tribulations and hairbreadth escapes in an antebellum wilderness that’s much grimmer and bloodier than Twain’s. There’s also a revelation toward the end that, however stunning to devoted readers of the original, makes perfect sense.
One of the noblest characters in American literature gets a novel worthy of him.Pub Date: March 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780385550369
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
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