An engaging and moving blend of comedy, suspense, and a well-defined male teen voice.
In this YA novel, a creepy roadside attraction becomes a dangerous catalyst for a teenager, unraveling family secrets.
Sixteen-year-old Nate Cortland eagerly anticipates that his upcoming summer job at the San Francisco Bay Area’s Golden Gate Racquet Club will have a positive effect on his dating life. Those high hopes are dashed when his single mom, a cyberforensics expert, informs Nate and his 11-year-old sister, Lily, that they’ll be spending the summer with Uncle Kevin “just to be on the safe side.” His mom’s sudden “I have a bad feeling” hunches have meant middle-of-the-night moves from one apartment to another before, but she’s never sent them to stay with her brother (“A precarious branch on the family tree,” thinks Nate). Kevin, who lives on the Sacramento River Delta in a Podunk town, runs a weird roadside attraction called the Owl Harbor House of Illusion. Even worse, the siblings’ mom confiscates their cellphones so they won’t be tracked, leaving them at Kevin’s with just a landline and no internet. Throw in the mystery of mom’s disappearance; Nate’s feelings for soulful teen Mia; the seeming emergence of Lily’s psychic abilities; and the House of Illusion’s tie to a legendary treasure and the menacing bumblers who seek it, and the protagonist will have a summer to remember. Anchored by the authenticity of Nate’s voice (observant, salty, and genuinely witty), Polito’s second YA novel is a deft mix of tension, humor, and surprising poignancy, with a “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t out to get you” twist. The narrative is lively with situational antics and Nate’s penchant for amusing quips, yet his angry anxiety about his mother and his irritation with and protectiveness of his little sister ring true. Also realistic are Nate’s maturing sense of self, evident in his encounters with some dubious local teens, and his changing views of his offbeat family. Mia’s calming presence, hard-won after a personal tragedy that she confides to Nate (and the reason she paints), is a graceful counterpoint.
An engaging and moving blend of comedy, suspense, and a well-defined male teen voice.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-953944-16-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wise Wolf Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
A rare second volume that surpasses the first, with, happily, more intrigue and passion still to come.
A heady blend of courtly double-crossing, Faerie lore, and toxic attraction swirls together in the sequel to The Cruel Prince (2018).
Five months after engineering a coup, human teen Jude is starting to feel the strain of secretly controlling King Cardan and running his Faerie kingdom. Jude’s self-loathing and anger at the traumatic events of her childhood (her Faerie “dad” killed her parents, and Faerie is not a particularly easy place even for the best-adjusted human) drive her ambition, which is tempered by her desire to make the world she loves and hates a little fairer. Much of the story revolves around plotting (the Queen of the Undersea wants the throne; Jude’s Faerie father wants power; Jude’s twin, Taryn, wants her Faerie betrothed by her side), but the underlying tension—sexual and political—between Jude and Cardan also takes some unexpected twists. Black’s writing is both contemporary and classic; her world is, at this point, intensely well-realized, so that some plot twists seem almost inevitable. Faerie is a strange place where immortal, multihued, multiformed denizens can’t lie but can twist everything; Jude—who can lie—is an outlier, and her first-person, present-tense narration reveals more than she would choose. With curly dark brown hair, Jude and Taryn are never identified by race in human terms.
A rare second volume that surpasses the first, with, happily, more intrigue and passion still to come. (map) (Fantasy. 14-adult)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31035-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2018
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