A sweet, quasi–coming-out love story with a bass line tailored for art and design fanatics. (Fiction. 13-18)
Picking a prom date is tricky, particularly when you can’t decide which sex to ask.
To any observer, high school senior Jamie Peterson, designer of the school literary magazine, coasts along with the support of a loving family, an uncommon level of popularity and the camaraderie of his longtime best friend, Mason. As the year draws to a close, he struggles with the eternal question: Whom will he ask to prom? The discovery that Mason is taking a girl makes Jamie jealous. Though Jamie is gay and out to his family (his parents demonstrate Boy Meets Boy utopian support), he isn’t out at school. When he realizes his jealousy and subsequent fantasies about dreamy Mason are reason enough to come out, he second-, third- and fourth-guesses himself, not wanting to ruin the friendship. A clutch of perceptive female classmates sees Jamie’s turmoil and roots for him to make a move, an enthusiasm that could ultimately humiliate both Jamie and Mason. Though the main characters are well-realized, a flood of minor characters introduced at the start of the book and sporadically thereafter proves more distracting than pertinent. The portrait of a half-in, half-out gay teen seen as confident by everyone but himself is touching, though the message to accept diversity is occasionally more didactic than encouraging.
A sweet, quasi–coming-out love story with a bass line tailored for art and design fanatics. (Fiction. 13-18)Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-06-224315-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Katherine Tegen/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Whether you came for the lore or the love, perfection.
Broken people, complicated families, magic, and Faerie politics: Black’s back.
After the tumultuous ending to the last volume (marriage, exile, and the seeming collapse of all her plots), Jude finds herself in the human world, which lacks appeal despite a childhood spent longing to go back. The price of her upbringing becomes clear: A human raised in the multihued, multiformed, always capricious Faerie High Court by the man who killed her parents, trained for intrigue and combat, recruited to a spy organization, and ultimately the power behind the coup and the latest High King, Jude no longer understands how to exist happily in a world that isn’t full of magic and danger. A plea from her estranged twin sends her secretly back to Faerie, where things immediately come to a boil with Cardan (king, nemesis, love interest) and all the many political strands Jude has tugged on for the past two volumes. New readers will need to go back to The Cruel Prince (2018) to follow the complexities—political and personal side plots abound—but the legions of established fans will love every minute of this lushly described, tightly plotted trilogy closer. Jude might be traumatized and emotionally unhealthy, but she’s an antihero worth cheering on. There are few physical descriptions of humans and some queer representation.
Whether you came for the lore or the love, perfection. (Fantasy. 14-adult)Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31042-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution.
A teenage girl finds herself alone after everyone else in her town mysteriously disappears, leaving her scrambling to figure out how to find them all.
One late summer day, everybody in July Fielding’s town disappears. She is left to piece together what happened, following a series of cryptic signs she finds around town urging her to “GET THEM BACK.” The narrative moves back and forth between July’s present and the events of the summer before, when her relationship with her best friend, cross-country team co-captain Sydney, starts to fracture due to a combination of jealousy over July’s new relationship with a cute boy called Sam and sweet up-and-coming freshman Ella’s threatening to overtake Syd’s status as star of the track team. The team members participate in a ritual in which they jump off a cliff into the rocky waters below at the end of their Friday practice runs. Though Ella is reluctant, Syd pressures her to jump. Short, frenetically paced sections move the story along quickly, and there is much foreshadowing pointing to something terrible that occurred at the end of that summer, which may be the key to July’s current predicament, but there is much misdirection too. Ultimately this is a story without enough setup to make the turn the book takes in the end feel fully developed or earned. All characters read white.
A high-concept premise that falls short in its execution. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9780593327173
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
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