A stronger-than-she-realizes heroine uses her disconcerting telepathic gifts to help others and heal herself in this...
After moving to a rural Australian town, Sasha’s unwelcome premonitions lead her to solve a string of art thefts while tackling her own issues.
Ever since her mum left, Sasha’s “life has turned into a huge, weird disaster area.” The sad, anxious Sasha knows her dad’s trying hard to hold the family together. When he accepts a police job in Manna Creek to “make a new life,” Sasha decides she’ll give “moving to the back of nowhere” a chance, just to make him happy. Unimpressed with the drab town, the bedraggled house behind the police station and the hostile locals who resent the new cop’s kids, Sasha and younger brother Nicky explore with their new pet police dog, King. Sasha’s freaked out when she finds that she and King can communicate telepathically and even more upset when she starts dreaming about local people, past and present, who are about to die. Is there something wrong with her? Should she tell her father or repress everything? In an authentic first-person voice, Sasha fumes at her missing mum, reacts negatively to Manna Creek, supports her father and brother and conveys her fears about her telepathic powers as she leads the tense, fast-moving plot to resolution.
A stronger-than-she-realizes heroine uses her disconcerting telepathic gifts to help others and heal herself in this satisfying adventure. (Paranormal adventure. 11-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-61067-063-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Kane Miller
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2011
Groups considering mounting productions that go beyond the popular musicals may want to consider looking at this uneven but...
Newly created plays for young people are not published very often, so this collection merits some attention.
The four dramas, commissioned by the well-respected Minneapolis Children’s Theater Company, are about growing up in ethnically diverse communities, but the plays cover different sets of problems for their young protagonists. Esperanza Rising, loosely adapted from the novel by Pam Muñoz Ryan, is set during the Depression, when Mexican immigrants competed with Okies for agricultural jobs in California. Esperanza changes from a pampered rich girl into a hard worker. The others are very contemporary. In Average Family, a reality-TV contest brings the wealthy Minneapolis Roubidoux family back to a Native American lifestyle they have never known. Also set in Minneapolis, the strongest play (at least on the page), Snapshot Silhouette, features a resilient Somali refugee, Najma, who finds both her voice and a new friend when she moves in with a well-meaning African American mother and her disaffected daughter; they are struggling as a family after the murder of an older daughter. Sasha, an isolated child of a Russian immigrant, finally gets to know her neighbors when she goes looking for a pen to write a research paper on the eponymous Brooklyn Bridge, the most artificial selection.
Groups considering mounting productions that go beyond the popular musicals may want to consider looking at this uneven but thought-provoking anthology. (Drama. 11-14)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8166-7313-1
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Univ. of Minnesota
Review Posted Online: Aug. 23, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
An entertaining romp, even without the raunchy bits.
A faithful (if relatively clean) version of the world’s oldest surviving complete novel, written “for librarians, teachers, scholars, and extremely intelligent children,” according to the afterword.
Usher (Wise Guy: The Life and Philosophy of Socrates, 2005) frames his adaptation as a tale within a tale in which the author meets two travelers on the road. He listens as one describes how he was transformed into an ass by reckless use of a stolen magical ointment, is mistreated in turn by robbers, “eunuch priests” (homosexual con men, in the original) and other rough handlers—then transformed at long last into a human boy by the goddess Isis. Though all of the sex and most of the dissolute behavior has been excised, the lad’s first transformation is milked throughout for double entendres—“Oh no!” gasps a witness. “You’ve made an ass of yourself!”—and there are plenty of silly incidents and names (silly in Latin, anyway, like a dopey Centurion dubbed Decius Verissimus Stultus) to lighten the overall tone. Motley’s elaborate illustrated initials and pen-and-ink drawings add satiric bite (“Eat roses from my bosom,” intones Isis mystically, floating over awed worshipers like a divine Vanna White) and further comic elements. So thoroughly reworked that even the original’s most famous imbedded story, “Cupid and Psyche,” is relegated to an appendix, this nonetheless conveys a clear sense of Apuleius’ plot, language and major themes.
An entertaining romp, even without the raunchy bits. (afterword) (Classic. 11-14)Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-56792-418-3
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Godine
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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