A charming, if uneven, coming-of-age tale.
A 12-year-old girl experiences a season of change and hope during the winter of 1962 in this middle-grade novel.
Kate Dunn, the Irish-American daughter of a police officer, lives in a comfortable apartment in Manhattan’s Washington Heights with her parents, older brother Rory, and younger brother Danny and attends the local Catholic school. Her family expects that she will eventually become a nurse or a flight attendant, but the highly intelligent Kate refuses to accept limitations on her ambitions. She regularly wins awards at her school for academic excellence, and she received a full scholarship to the Sacred Heart of Mary Academy. When she’s not spending time with her best friend, Mary Garvey, she pores over a well-worn copy of Black’s Law Dictionary. As the Christmas season approaches, she looks forward to preparing for high school; however, the winter of 1962 ends up being anything but typical for Kate. The region endures unusually frigid weather, dubbed “The Freeze” by local residents. As she waits for the snow predicted by her eccentric neighbor Miss H. Wellington Grimes, her parents cope with problems of their own: Her father faces pressures in his new assignment in the narcotics squad while also dealing with guilt over his actions during World War II, and her mother is secretly saving money. As Christmas approaches, Kate learns a secret that threatens to alter her plans for the future. DeBoer’s debut is a sensitively crafted portrait of a young girl growing up at a pivotal time for women in America. Kate is a dynamic protagonist who has big plans for her future and refuses to let anyone tell her what she can achieve, and the tension between her ambitions and society’s expectations informs her relationships with her father, who tells her that “Girls become nurses,” and Mary, who plans to forgo college in favor of secretarial school. The Washington Heights setting is a significant part of the narrative, and the author brings it to life with vivid descriptions of the community and nuanced supporting characters. Most of the action takes place in Kate’s apartment building or in the streets of the surrounding neighborhood. The reader’s guide to life in the building is Flann McFarland, its superintendent, who regularly regales the children with fantastic stories of a kingdom in Ireland called “Shiloh.” Flann’s own tale of heartbreak is a poignant one. Another memorable resident is the aforementioned Miss Grimes, a woman who spent a colorful childhood in a traveling circus. That said, the novel would have benefited from sharper editing. At times, the prose is lyrical, particularly during a speech from Miss Grimes, in which she tells the protagonist, “Your life will at times, feel very much like a circus, Kate. The acts will come and go.” However, there are occasional misspellings of notable real-life people and places.
A charming, if uneven, coming-of-age tale.Pub Date: Nov. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-9737-7028-2
Page Count: 202
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 8, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Outrageous, darkly comic fun of the sort you’d expect from Palahniuk.
The latest comic outrage from Palahniuk (Choke, 2001, etc.) concerns a lethal African poem, an unwitting serial killer, a haunted-house broker, and a frozen baby. In other words, the usual Palahniuk fare.
Carl Streator is a grizzled City Desk reporter whose outlook on life has a lot to do with years of interviewing grief-stricken parents, spouses, children, victims, and survivors. His latest investigation is a series of crib deaths. A very good reporter, one thing he’s got is an eye for detail, and he notices that there’s always a copy of the same book (Poems and Rhymes Around the World) at the scene of these deaths. In fact, more often than not, the book is open to an African nursery rhyme called a “culling chant.” A deadly lullaby? It sounds crazy, but Carl discovers that simply by thinking about someone while reciting the poem he can knock him off in no time at all. First, his editor dies. Then an annoying radio host named Dr. Sara. It’s too much to be a coincidence: Carl needs help—and fast, before he kills off everyone he knows. He investigates the book and finds that it was published in a small edition now mainly held in public libraries, so he begins by tracking down everyone known to have checked the book out. This brings him to the office of Helen Hoover Boyle, a realtor who makes a good living selling haunted houses—and reselling them a few months later after the owners move out. A son of Helen’s died of crib death about 20 years ago, and she’s reluctant to talk to Carl until he gains the confidence of her Wiccan secretary, Mona Sabbat. Together, Carl, Helen, Mona, and Mona’s ecoterrorist/scam-artist boyfriend Oyster set out across the country to find and destroy every one of the 200-plus remaining copies of Poems and Rhymes. But can Carl (and Helen) forget the chant themselves? Pandora never did manage to get her box shut, after all.
Outrageous, darkly comic fun of the sort you’d expect from Palahniuk.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-50447-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to...
A small Tennessee mountain town is awash in sex and scandal in Belle’s first novel.
Gia Andrews, a disaster relief worker, is also a convicted murderer’s daughter. Her father, Ray, was convicted of killing his wife and Gia’s stepmother, Ella Mae, and sentenced to life in prison. But Ray is dying, and prison officials are releasing him on compassionate grounds; Gia’s uncle Cal, a prominent lawyer, has recruited her to return home from Kenya to care for her dad in his home in Rogersville. Despite the fact that she hasn’t seen her father since she left many years ago, she returns, believing her brother, Bo, and sister, Lexi, will help her, but she finds that neither wants anything to do with their father. Her nearest allies turn out to be the home-care worker Uncle Cal has hired, Fannie, and the new man she meets, a bar-and-grill owner named Jake. When Gia meets a law professor planning to write a book about wrongful convictions, he tells her he believes Ray didn’t kill Ella Mae and that Cal, who was Ray’s attorney, didn’t mount much of a defense. After looking into these allegations, Gia discovers her stepmother had an affair with another man and wonders whether her father could be innocent after all. While trying to unravel the mystery of who really killed Ella Mae, things heat up between Gia and Jake, and suddenly the mystery takes a whole new direction. Belle’s a smooth writer whose characters are vibrant and truly reflect the area where the novel is set, but the plot—while clever—takes a back seat to Gia’s and Ella Mae’s separate, but equally steamy, sexual exploits.
Thriller fans will find so much space devoted to Gia and Jake’s sexual acrobatics that little time is left for the plot to develop.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1722-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harlequin MIRA
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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