Edge-of-the-seat suspense and realistic portrayals of a pair of boys facing personal and elemental trials make this novel a...
Preteen angst, a blinding snowstorm, and an ice-fishing competition gone wrong add up to a dramatic life-and-death struggle for two friends in this YA adventure.
First prize for the Oneida Lake Ice Fishing Derby is an ATV and a “fully-loaded ice fishing hut.” Tanner Phillips, the tale’s 12-year-old narrator, is determined to not only win, but also to prove to his dad and the other adults in the competition that he’s not the screw-up little kid who blew it last year. But nothing goes as planned. The boy and his jittery new friend, Richie Donald, already unnerved by what they fear may be the fatal disappearance of one competitor at the hands of another, are left alone on the ice when Tanner’s dad must rush an injured contestant to the hospital. Still, Tanner refuses to give up his quest for the big walleye that will ensure his victory. CassanoLochman (God’s Light, 2018, etc.), the author of YA novels and spiritual verse, expertly wraps a mystery, a strong sense of foreboding, family woes, and the confusion, grandiosity, and resentments of early adolescence around surprisingly in-depth details about the lures, lines, gear, and subtleties of ice fishing on a cold winter morning. (“A large cloud of frozen breath billowed and curled from my nostrils,” Tanner relates. “I found comfort in the solitude and scanned the familiar shoreline….I loved this lake and knew her shoreline as well as any Oneida fisherman.”) Even readers with little interest in the sport should find it difficult to put this tense, eventful book down as one disaster follows another—injuries, lost cellphones, and a howling snowstorm rocketing the untethered ice hut across the lake onto thinning ice. The challenges to both boys’ courage and hitherto untested strengths of character ring true. And when Tanner can no longer keep up a brave front for panicky Richie’s benefit (“I want to see my mom and dad. I want to be done on this ice!”) and the roles are reversed, the tale is genuinely moving.
Edge-of-the-seat suspense and realistic portrayals of a pair of boys facing personal and elemental trials make this novel a substantial page-turner.Pub Date: Oct. 31, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-944878-74-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Ontario Shore Publishing LLC
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with...
Talk-show queen takes tumble as millions jeer.
Nora Bridges is a wildly popular radio spokesperson for family-first virtues, but her loyal listeners don't know that she walked out on her husband and teenaged daughters years ago and didn't look back. Now that a former lover has sold racy pix of naked Nora and horny himself to a national tabloid, her estranged daughter Ruby, an unsuccessful stand-up comic in Los Angeles, has been approached to pen a tell-all. Greedy for the fat fee she's been promised, Ruby agrees and heads for the San Juan Islands, eager to get reacquainted with the mom she plans to betray. Once in the family homestead, nasty Ruby alternately sulks and glares at her mother, who is temporarily wheelchair-bound as a result of a post-scandal car crash. Uncaring, Ruby begins writing her side of the story when she's not strolling on the beach with former sweetheart Dean Sloan, the son of wealthy socialites who basically ignored him and his gay brother Eric. Eric, now dying of cancer and also in a wheelchair, has returned to the island. This dismal threesome catch up on old times, recalling their childhood idylls on the island. After Ruby's perfect big sister Caroline shows up, there's another round of heartfelt talk. Nora gradually reveals the truth about her unloving husband and her late father's alcoholism, which led her to seek the approval of others at the cost of her own peace of mind. And so on. Ruby is aghast to discover that she doesn't know everything after all, but Dean offers her subdued comfort. Happy endings await almost everyone—except for readers of this nobly preachy snifflefest.
The best-selling author of tearjerkers like Angel Falls (2000) serves up yet another mountain of mush, topped off with syrupy platitudes about life and love.Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60737-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2001
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
