Sweetly satisfying.
When Meg’s family travels to New Zealand for six months, her best friend, Oscar, suffers a series of humiliations that lead him to try and take his own life.
After receiving the news of Oscar’s disappearance, Meg’s family returns to Ireland to find everyone searching. But after weeks without luck, only Meg and Oscar’s brother, Stevie, refuse to give up the hope that Oscar is still alive. Meg begins to piece together the events that led to Oscar’s desperate plummet off the town’s pier. Chapters told from Oscar’s point of view show that he is alive but in hiding. The two interlocking stories reveal the terrible plan designed to break Oscar’s spirit as well as the person responsible at its heart. While this is a sweet story of friendship and first love, it is also a road map for keeping hope alive. And while Oscar temporarily loses his way, he is quick to point out that others should never stop searching. Clueless adults, an over-the-top mean girl, and a picturesque small-town atmosphere all come together to make this a quiet story that may be the tiny push that someone thinking of giving up needs to keep going. Meg, a prototypical pale, Irish redhead, and Stevie, who uses a wheelchair and is absolutely indomitable, make a formidable team.
Sweetly satisfying. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: April 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8234-3561-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Promising elements aplenty, but they never fully mesh or deliver more than a passing chill.
Cryptic clues in a Web comic put a Seattle teenager onto the trail of a deranged kidnapper and his victim.
Three years after the (supposed) drowning of bosom friend Libby, 16-year-old May is shocked to see new stickers and other merch for “Princess X,” an intrepid swordswoman in a puff-sleeved dress and sneakers that she and Libby had privately invented in fifth grade. The princess’s recently posted online adventures tell a scary tale about escaping from a “Needle Man” years after being stolen as a replacement for his own dead daughter. They leave May convinced that Libby is still alive—hiding out from her clever, relentless captor and imbedding veiled messages in the comic that only May would catch. Said hints lead May and Trick, a hacker dude she goes to for help, on a quest through the city’s seedier and underground quarters to encounters with Jackdaw (a gay, goth Robin Hood) and a desperate scheme to steal proof of the Needle Man’s perfidy. Priest cranks the suspense somewhat by casting the kidnapper as both an IT expert and a killer, but because he mostly appears only in the emotionally charged, sparely drawn purple-and-black comics pages that Ciesemier scatters through the tale’s first two-thirds, he remains, at best, a shadowy bogeyman.
Promising elements aplenty, but they never fully mesh or deliver more than a passing chill. (Thriller. 11-14)Pub Date: May 26, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-545-62085-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Levine/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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