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
Aspiring filmmaker/first-novelist Chbosky adds an upbeat ending to a tale of teenaged angst—the right combination of realism and uplift to allow it on high school reading lists, though some might object to the sexuality, drinking, and dope-smoking. More sophisticated readers might object to the rip-off of Salinger, though Chbosky pays homage by having his protagonist read Catcher in the Rye. Like Holden, Charlie oozes sincerity, rails against celebrity phoniness, and feels an extraliterary bond with his favorite writers (Harper Lee, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Ayn Rand, etc.). But Charlie’s no rich kid: the third child in a middle-class family, he attends public school in western Pennsylvania, has an older brother who plays football at Penn State, and an older sister who worries about boys a lot. An epistolary novel addressed to an anonymous “friend,” Charlie’s letters cover his first year in high school, a time haunted by the recent suicide of his best friend. Always quick to shed tears, Charlie also feels guilty about the death of his Aunt Helen, a troubled woman who lived with Charlie’s family at the time of her fatal car wreck. Though he begins as a friendless observer, Charlie is soon pals with seniors Patrick and Sam (for Samantha), stepsiblings who include Charlie in their circle, where he smokes pot for the first time, drops acid, and falls madly in love with the inaccessible Sam. His first relationship ends miserably because Charlie remains compulsively honest, though he proves a loyal friend (to Patrick when he’s gay-bashed) and brother (when his sister needs an abortion). Depressed when all his friends prepare for college, Charlie has a catatonic breakdown, which resolves itself neatly and reveals a long-repressed truth about Aunt Helen. A plain-written narrative suggesting that passivity, and thinking too much, lead to confusion and anxiety. Perhaps the folks at (co-publisher) MTV see the synergy here with Daria or any number of videos by the sensitive singer-songwriters they feature.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02734-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: MTV Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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