A light read with room to delve deeper.
A former competitive gymnast tries to reimagine her life.
When a diagnosis of spinal stenosis forces 15-year-old Caroline to quit gymnastics, the Kansas state beam champion doesn’t know what to do next. Her best friends, Sunny Chavez and Peregrine Liu, still practice seven hours a day. But Caro’s older brother’s best friend, rising senior and tennis star Alex Zavala, offers to spend the rest of the summer coaching her in other sports she might enjoy. When Caro discovers that Alex has a crush on Sunny, she and Peregrine spend a long time plotting to get them together only for Caro to discover that she herself has a crush on Alex. Fortunately, Alex reciprocates—just when Caro also falls in love with tennis and it’s time for the big tournament at the local country club. Henning was herself a high-level gymnast, and it shows: The brief scenes of Caro in the gym attempting high-level maneuvers crackle with authenticity and tension. The rest is a fairly standard teen rom-com with lots of descriptions of food and clothes, lots of who-drives-whom-where, and plenty of snarky conversation. Caro’s being forced to give up her dream offers scope for real emotional complexity, but Henning doesn’t dig for it; the novel stays on the surface, easy enough to read but not particularly compelling. Caro and Alex read as White; Sunny and Peregrine are cued as having Latinx and East Asian heritage, respectively.
A light read with room to delve deeper. (Fiction. 12-18)Pub Date: May 31, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5667-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Poppy/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2022
Part cautionary tale, part juicy love story, this will appeal to action and adventure fans who aren't yet sick of the genre.
A dystopic thriller joins the crowded shelves but doesn't distinguish itself.
Juliette was torn from her home and thrown into an asylum by The Reestablishment, a militaristic regime in control since an environmental catastrophe left society in ruins. Juliette’s journal holds her tortured thoughts in an attempt to repress memories of the horrific act that landed her in a cell. Mysteriously, Juliette’s touch kills. After months of isolation, her captors suddenly give her a cellmate—Adam, a drop-dead gorgeous guy. Adam, it turns out, is immune to her deadly touch. Unfortunately, he’s a soldier under orders from Warner, a power-hungry 19-year-old. But Adam belongs to a resistance movement; he helps Juliette escape to their stronghold, where she finds that she’s not the only one with superhuman abilities. The ending falls flat as the plot devolves into comic-book territory. Fast-paced action scenes convey imminent danger vividly, but there’s little sense of a broader world here. Overreliance on metaphor to express Juliette’s jaw-dropping surprise wears thin: “My mouth is sitting on my kneecaps. My eyebrows are dangling from the ceiling.” For all of her independence and superpowers, Juliette never moves beyond her role as a pawn in someone else’s schemes.
Part cautionary tale, part juicy love story, this will appeal to action and adventure fans who aren't yet sick of the genre. (Science fiction. 12 & up)Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-208548-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperTeen
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
SEEN & HEARD
An appealing, complex romance infused with magical elements and balancing tension and heart.
Will shared visions of a possible future fate bring two teens together or set them on a course to ruin each other’s lives?
Chanel Cao, daughter of a model and a nightclub-owning billionaire, is the it girl at Beijing’s Airington International Boarding School. Ares Yin is the brooding and mysterious new student who seems “not just intimidating, but actually dangerous.” After Chanel spots Ares sitting alone at an exclusive restaurant one night, she’s intrigued enough to follow him into a park. She approaches him as he stands beside a lake—and when the moonlight shines upon the water’s surface, they both see a vision. Chanel sees her childhood home on fire with her mother inside and Ares standing nearby, holding a lighter; Ares sees his missing brother across the street from the burning house. Each teen becomes convinced that the other is key to their future—saving Chanel’s house and her mother’s life and finding the brother who’s been gone for three years. Chanel, who plots to save her mother by getting Ares to fall in love with her, was a minor character in Liang’s debut, If You Could See the Sun (2022), and this enjoyable stand-alone companion novel gives her room for compelling growth. Liang also explores complicated familial ties with nuance. Ares and Chanel have palpable romantic tension, and the development of their relationship drives a great deal of the story’s momentum.
An appealing, complex romance infused with magical elements and balancing tension and heart. (Speculative romance. 12-18)Pub Date: April 14, 2026
ISBN: 9781335014115
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2026
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