A well-written, if occasionally ponderous, exploration of modern high school life.
Myrick’s debut novel follows several teenagers at two Virginia high schools as they find their paths.
The book opens at Hilltop Academy, a private school populated by the children of faculty at two nearby colleges. Chelsea silently critiques school policies (“So what’s inside my backpack is important, but not what’s inside me?”) and her clique-y classmates. She also connects with recent California transplant Sean, who, like her, is struggling to find his place. Sean organizes a nature walk in response to the suicide of a bullied student. Then he persuades his parents to let him transfer to the less-exclusive Stone Creek High School, where he joins Chelsea’s friends Cora, a politically active organizer exploring her biracial heritage; Jake, who wants to follow his father into agriculture despite the challenges faced by small farmers; and the gregarious Daniel, whose nickname is “Mr. Mayor.” Stone Creek’s unconventional principal, Mr. Shepherd, answers to the name “Chief” and encourages student autonomy. The book’s narration shifts among the various students as they deal with personal and academic challenges and make their ways toward graduation. Myrick is a thoughtful writer who gets deep into her characters’ psyches. That said, the teenagers’ self-centered, pseudo-intellectual voices are so accurately portrayed as to be grating at times (as when Sean describes Hilltop Academy to Daniel’s mother: “we were the fish, kept apart from the real world of natural waters, glubbing around in circles, until we almost believed it was normal”). However, the author seems determined to give full weight to her young characters’ arguments, no matter how petty they might appear to adults. This is demonstrated by how she uses the character of Chief, who repeatedly learns from the kids under his charge.
A well-written, if occasionally ponderous, exploration of modern high school life.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-63152-423-3
Page Count: 303
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
PERSPECTIVES
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