A funny tale with great advice for those who “fit out,” not in.
A boy has only a month before school starts to run friendship experiments in this illustrated children’s novel.
Maximilian Alexander McConk is 9.85 years old—he enjoys being precise—and is about to enter fourth grade. Although science makes sense to him, people don’t. Ever since preschool, his best friend Miguel has been the one who initiates conversations with other kids. Max isn’t shy all the time, but he’s self-conscious about not fitting in. Unlike most kids he meets, Max loves to read and gather facts, and he loves rhyming words. He also has a few other unusual quirks, such as wearing racing goggles and a cape, geocaching for fun, and taking banjo lessons. In sum, says Max, “Lonely + different + shy = YIKES!” After Miguel moves away, Max decides to use the scientific method to find new friend. He tries out several hypotheses, including changing his behavior in order to fit in with other kids, before eventually settling on just being himself. At first, his experiments at a nearby park end in tongue-tied embarrassment and flight, but he keeps trying. Max’s mother, referencing the “bee girl” in the music video for Blind Melon’s 1992 song “No Rain,” says that “you just need to find YOUR bees!” The advice eventually works, and Max celebrates his three new friends in rhyme: “I GET my new bros, and my new bros GET me, / and oh, by the way, one new bro is a SHE!” In her debut novel, author/illustrator Giles cleverly uses composition-notebook graphics to emphasize the science experiment format of the story. Max’s voice is believable, funny, and fresh—he sounds like he’d be a great kid to know. The book acknowledges, with compassion, how difficult it is for offbeat, shy kids to make friends, and it offers useful guidelines to “Finding YOUR Bees.” Its perspective on “fitting in” is also useful: “Just because I don’t fit IN doesn’t mean that I don’t fit somewhere.” The pleasingly jaunty illustrations depict a diverse group of kids with various skin tones; Max has “LOTS of curly black hair” and light brown skin.
A funny tale with great advice for those who “fit out,” not in.Pub Date: Feb. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948889-00-1
Page Count: 125
Publisher: Birch Books
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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