Two tales with some good moments hampered by awkward, skimpy storytelling.
In this YA novella and short story, two different young women must figure out their romantic attachments.
In the title novella, 19-year-old Camille “Cami” Alexander is five days away from an important conservatory audition in New York City, where she intends to play her 1713 Stradivarius violin. She’s nervous, and she’s also worried about her boyfriend, Jackson, who’s just been arrested and jailed for stealing computers. Jim, her 27-year-old music teacher, has feelings for her and thinks that she should forget about Jackson. After Jackson gets out on bail, he makes aggressive demands, and Cami breaks up with him. When her Strad goes missing, she suspects her ex but has no alternative but to audition with a borrowed violin. In the short story “Redemption,” Kara, 21, hopes for a second chance with Martin, her 24-year-old former boyfriend. A year ago, he persuaded her to have sex with him even though they both valued virginity highly; when she became pregnant, he left her, but she loves him, nonetheless. They meet up and go for a drive, but Martin is distant and even speaks in tongues when she tries to talk to him. “He’s so holy and beautiful,” Kara thinks, as she prepares to divulge a big secret. Heidelberg (All the Pretty Roses, 2017, etc.) offers two swiftly moving narratives. However, they’re both rather sketchily detailed, with obvious moments of exposition filling in gaps. For instance, Jim explains to Camille how his parents came to be her guardians after her own parents’ deaths—something that she’d surely already know. It would have been helpful to have more explanation at other points, though, such as why Camille ever considered Jackson to be a good boyfriend. Both the novella and story end on notes of easy wish fulfillment that make them less powerful. Heidelberg sometimes offers some engaging reflections, however, as when biracial Cami wonders if Jim considers himself a better prospect for her because he’s white; Jackson is mixed-race, but Cami notes that, in the eyes of the Mississippi community, “she was black, and so was Jackson.”
Two tales with some good moments hampered by awkward, skimpy storytelling.Pub Date: March 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5450-1540-7
Page Count: 72
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
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