An unevenly executed story of two girls who are separated by a century.
In Just’s (Anjel, 2018, etc.) YA fantasy novel, a teenager’s seemingly boring birthday gift becomes a window to the past.
Sam Reed was expecting an iPhone for her 14th birthday—not an old, blank journal that her father found in the house that he’s restoring. She writes a throwaway entry, just to appease him, before tossing it aside. But when she opens the journal again later, there are additional passages, written in very elegant handwriting. The entries are for the same date as hers, but in the year 1914, not 2014, and they’re signed “Emma Rose Reed.” At first, Sam believes that her father is trying to play some kind of trick on her, so she sets up a webcam. But instead of catching her dad writing in the diary, she sees words spontaneously appear on its pages—as if an invisible person is composing them. Soon, Sam and her best friend, Hailey, begin exchanging messages with a mysterious girl from 100 years ago. After an unfortunate accident leaves Sam without a phone, she devises a way to make some quick cash—specifically, by having her friend from the past hide some 1914 stamps, so that Sam can recover them and sell them to collectors. But the plan may have unexpected and possibly deadly consequences. Later on, Sam figures out when her new acquaintance is destined to die. Author Just offers an intriguing speculative-fiction novel that features elements of time-travel tales. Overall, the teenage characters feel authentic to their age, whether they exist in the present or in the past. The story itself is paced well, but it lacks the emotional depth that’s necessary to really draw the reader into it. Even later in the novel, when multiple characters face potential mortal danger, the story never manages to make the characters’ feelings seem real. Also, the story spends a bit too much time on unnecessary subplots involving side characters, instead of deepening the characterizations of the main players.
An unevenly executed story of two girls who are separated by a century.Pub Date: June 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9910790-5-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Cedar Creek Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 14, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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