This series opener is funny, mystical, and endearing, if flawed; here’s hoping Baylor continues his journey with a more...
A pair of twins, one living and one dead, facilitate communication between the two communities.
The dead appreciate Baylor Bosco for his help communicating with their loved ones. The living struggle to understand or embrace those messages, especially if they involve a botched family recipe. Living white boy Baylor and his ghost twin sister, Kristina, have set a clear afterlife arrangement. Baylor relays the messages, and Kristina handles crowd control. One night their supernatural bond is threatened when a dark spirit visits Baylor in his bedroom. Unsettled and unable to get answers, Kristina and Baylor search both worlds for answers. Whatever problems lie ahead, they will face them together. In his debut, Imfeld creates in Baylor, Kristina, and their band of friends kids who could be found in any middle school. Well-rounded but not perfect, each main character has a moment to shine. However, for all the depth of the white protagonists, the side characters are given short shrift and occasionally even reduced to stereotype. Evoking a Latina’s accent with rolled R’s and phonetic spellings and describing a black character's hair as “out-of-control” distract readers and mar this work. Baylor's adventures will intrigue, excite, and captivate young readers, but they also risk alienating young brown and black children looking for adventure.
This series opener is funny, mystical, and endearing, if flawed; here’s hoping Baylor continues his journey with a more multidimensional cast. (Fantasy. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6636-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A satisfying story of family, friendship and small-town cooperation in a 21st-century world.
Sent to stay with octogenarian relatives for the summer, 14-year-old Mike ends up coordinating a community drive to raise $40,000 for the adoption of a Romanian orphan. He’ll never be his dad's kind of engineer, but he learns he’s great at human engineering.
Mike’s math learning disability is matched by his widower father's lack of social competence; the Giant Genius can’t even reliably remember his son’s name. Like many of the folks the boy comes to know in Do Over, Penn.—his great-uncle Poppy silent in his chair, the multiply pierced-and-tattooed Gladys from the bank and “a homeless guy” who calls himself Past—Mike feels like a failure. But in spite of his own lack of confidence, he provides the kick start they need to cope with their losses and contribute to the campaign. Using the Internet (especially YouTube), Mike makes use of town talents and his own webpage design skills and entrepreneurial imagination. Math-definition chapter headings (Compatible Numbers, Zero Property, Tessellations) turn out to apply well to human actions in this well-paced, first-person narrative. Erskine described Asperger’s syndrome from the inside in Mockingbird (2010). Here, it’s a likely cause for the rift between father and son touchingly mended at the novel's cinematic conclusion.
A satisfying story of family, friendship and small-town cooperation in a 21st-century world. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: June 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-25505-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones.
An exhilarating summer marked by death, gore and fire sparks deep thoughts in a small-town lad not uncoincidentally named “Jack Gantos.”
The gore is all Jack’s, which to his continuing embarrassment “would spray out of my nose holes like dragon flames” whenever anything exciting or upsetting happens. And that would be on every other page, seemingly, as even though Jack’s feuding parents unite to ground him for the summer after several mishaps, he does get out. He mixes with the undertaker’s daughter, a band of Hell’s Angels out to exact fiery revenge for a member flattened in town by a truck and, especially, with arthritic neighbor Miss Volker, for whom he furnishes the “hired hands” that transcribe what becomes a series of impassioned obituaries for the local paper as elderly town residents suddenly begin passing on in rapid succession. Eventually the unusual body count draws the—justified, as it turns out—attention of the police. Ultimately, the obits and the many Landmark Books that Jack reads (this is 1962) in his hours of confinement all combine in his head to broaden his perspective about both history in general and the slow decline his own town is experiencing.
Characteristically provocative gothic comedy, with sublime undertones. (Autobiographical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-37993-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
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