A whip-smart historical that highlights that transitionary period to which few would ever desire to return.
Draft dodging and literary censorship come to a head in this Canadian bildungsroman set in the 1970s.
While the Vietnam War rages, 13-year-old Charlotte and her best friend, Dawn, are doing their best to grow up without becoming awful teenagers in the process. While attending a supremely muddy be-in in full hippie regalia, the two befriend clean-cut Tom Ed, a well-mannered Texan draft dodger in need of a place to crash. Charlotte’s Quaker family takes him in, and Charlotte finds a true friend in the American guest. Meanwhile, the girls’ favorite English teacher is facing a censorship battle over Catcher in the Rye, and Charlotte feels a calling to help. Scintillating prose, rich dialogue, and charming characterizations mark a novel that straddles the boundary between middle-grade and YA. Charlotte, despite her determination to be an Unteen, has an age-appropriate fascination with menstruation and the concept of sex, and Tom Ed occasionally forgets his boundaries to drop the occasional swearword (“faggot,” “asshole”), adding to the book’s liminal feel. Charlotte, part of an all-white cast of characters, is a curious, confused, and delightful companion, wrestling with questions about her best friend’s flakiness and her brother’s emerging same-sex attraction. Ellis extends her insightful characterizations to the secondary cast, such as a censor’s daughter who is “snobby and scary, like she was just getting ready to be mean.”
A whip-smart historical that highlights that transitionary period to which few would ever desire to return. (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77306-072-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Groundwood
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
Although Stevenson leaves the family’s future up in the air, she gives Wolf a victory that will resonate with readers
Convinced that doom is imminent, Wolf’s free-spirit mom uproots the family for a quixotic cross-country consciousness-raising campaign to save the honeybees.
Having researched the school project that set Jade, his mom, in motion, 12-year-old Wolf knows that the bees are in danger, but he’d rather stay put and go to school, and he really doesn’t want to wear the stupid bee costume. Wolf‘s perpetually angry teenage stepsister, Violet, figures out how to bring boyfriend Ty along despite severe parental disapproval. And while 5-year-old Saffron seems perfectly happy to dance around in her bee outfit, her withdrawn twin, Whisper, has stopped talking entirely. Spurred by both their own misery and Whisper’s distress, Wolf and Violet decide they have to take the future Jade says they won’t have into their own hands. Stevenson takes a setup that could easily devolve into farce and focuses instead on the kids’ very real emotions. Wolf is a terrific narrator, more self-aware than the average 12-year-old but in the end just as ready to rationalize selfishness, however necessary, as his mother is. The twins, Violet, and the unexpectedly helpful Ty emerge as three-dimensional characters, as do some of the adults the family encounters. Both Jade and Wolf’s stepfather, however, are less successfully drawn, the former cartoonishly monomaniacal and the latter a cipher.
Although Stevenson leaves the family’s future up in the air, she gives Wolf a victory that will resonate with readers . (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4598-0834-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Orca
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
A predictable, fast-paced sports tale with some unexpected heart.
Harrison has led a hard-knock life up until he’s taken in by loving foster parents “Coach” and Jennifer.
After he inadvertently causes the man’s death, Harrison is taken from a brutal foster home run by a farmer who uses foster kids as unpaid labor, a situation blithely ignored by the county. His new foster parents are different. Coach is in charge of the middle school football team, and all 13-year-old Harrison has ever wanted to do is to play football, the perfect outlet for his seething undercurrent of anger at life. Oversized for his age, he’s brilliant at the game but also over-the-top aggressive, until a hit makes his knee start aching—and then life deals him another devastating blow. The pain isn’t an injury but bone cancer. Many of the characters—loving friends Justin and Becky, bully Leo, a mean-spirited math teacher, cancer victim Marty and the major, an amputee veteran who comes to rehabilitate Harrison after life-changing surgery—are straight out of the playbook for maudlin middle-grade fiction. Nevertheless, this effort edges above trite because of well-depicted football scenes and the sheer force of Harrison himself. His altogether believable anger diminishes his likability but breathes life into an otherwise stock role.
A predictable, fast-paced sports tale with some unexpected heart. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-208956-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2012
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