A trip to the mall becomes therapy in this high-school soap opera, third in the Hazelwood High series by Draper (Romiette and Julio, 1999; Forged by Fire, 1997). African-American narrator Keisha, having mourned the suicide of her ex-boyfriend, involves herself with an attractive older man—with near-disastrous results. Jonathan’s attention makes Keisha feel mature, so she defies her parents’ injunction not to date him and ends up having to defend herself from rape in his apartment—an event so nakedly foreshadowed that there is little tension. Draper presents an appealing circle of friends, but they are so ridiculously virtuous—eschewing sex before marriage, avoiding alcohol (not a whisper about drugs), doing their homework, diligently making college plans, impulsively giving soup to a homeless woman, coaxing an anorexic friend into eating—that they stand more as good role models for teen readers than as realistic characters. Dialogue is frequently stilted (“Especially in winter, blooming flowers bring smiles to folks like me who are sad and confused”), and the use of the ungrammatical “me and . . . ” nominative construction, presumably to create voice, is at odds with the high-achieving Keisha’s otherwise Standard English. This series appears to be an attempt to carve out a niche of the high-school problem-novel market for African-American teens; it’s a pity this offering only complements the banality so often found in this genre. (Fiction. YA)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-689-83080-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
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
A celebratory song of the sea.
A shrimpy 13-year-old with a super-sized passion for marine life comes of age during a summer of discovery on the tidal flats of Puget Sound.
Miles O’Malley—Squid Boy to his friends—doesn’t mind being short. It’s other things that keep him awake at night, like his parents’ talk of divorce and his increasingly lustful thoughts about the girl next door. Mostly, though, it’s the ocean’s siren call that steals his sleep. During one of his moonlit kayak excursions, Miles comes across the rarest sighting ever documented in the northern Pacific: the last gasp of a Giant Squid. Scientists are stunned. The media descend. As Miles continues to stumble across other oddball findings, including two invasive species that threaten the eco-balance of Puget Sound, a nearby new-age cult’s interest in Miles prompts a headline in USA Today: Kid Messiah? Soon tourists are flocking to the tidal flats, crushing crustaceans underfoot and painting their bodies with black mud. Dodging disingenuous journalists, deluded disciples and the death-throes of his parents’ marriage, Miles tries to recapture some semblance of normality. He reads up on the G-spot and the Kama Sutra to keep pace with his pals’ bull sessions about sex (hilariously contributing “advanced” details that gross the other boys out). But Miles’s aquatic observations cannot be undone, and as summer draws to a close, inhabitants of Puget Sound prepare for a national blitzkrieg of media and scientific attention and the highest tide in 40 years, all of which threatens everything Miles holds dear. On land, the rickety plot could have used some shoring up. Miles is just too resourceful for the reader to believe his happiness—or that of those he loves—is ever at stake. But when Miles is on the water, Lynch’s first novel becomes a stunning light show, both literal, during phosphorescent plankton blooms, and metaphorical, in the poetic fireworks Lynch’s prose sets off as he describes his clearly beloved Puget Sound.
A celebratory song of the sea.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-605-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
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