A heartfelt but meandering tale about a resourceful Indian student.
A fourth-grader helps underprivileged kids and learns a valuable lesson in this debut children’s novel.
Although Sona is smart and attends a prestigious international school in India, her grades aren’t what her mother expects. Often, the girl lacks focus and constantly wonders about the world around her. On her mother’s birthday, Sona and her parents visit an orphanage. Later, Sona worries about the orphans’ education and well-being. Her mother, who works for an organization teaching underprivileged kids, explains that children can get a good education anywhere— “where they get it is secondary.” Still, Sona wants to help. With the assistance of teachers, parents, and friends, she ensures that deprived and orphaned children participate in One Spectrum, her school’s extracurricular competition. Sona also urges Aunt Nyla, her mother’s friend and colleague, to help a boy named Pawan, who works at a tea stall. Despite Pawan’s limited education and poverty, he joins Sona’s community, inspiring many with his intelligence, cartography skills, and humility. One Spectrum is a huge success and Sona realizes that education and wealth don’t equal superiority. In this novel, Upadhyay offers a heartwarming message that emphasizes the importance of empathy, education, and literacy. A short, helpful glossary of terms is also included. The narrative delivers some nice lines like “Sona lived in an imaginative world where butterflies hovered over math textbooks and pencils danced.” But other literary devices are unusual (“Earth was a plump girl who…asked…the planets to get her desserts…if the planets did not bribe Earth by providing…desserts, she would say negative things about them”). Some significant facts are randomly inserted in the text rather than smoothly incorporated into the story. For example, Upadhyay describes late in the book how Sona’s mother lived in an orphanage as a kid. Integrated into the tale early on, this background would have added an intriguing element to Sona’s character. And topics and settings sometimes oddly skip around within the same paragraphs and sentences (“After spending the day with…children, she returned home. At 9 p.m., the party had just begun…guests were arriving at the venue”).
A heartfelt but meandering tale about a resourceful Indian student.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5437-0173-9
Page Count: 66
Publisher: PartridgeIndia
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.
Comprehensive, myth-busting examination of the Colorado high-school massacre.
“We remember Columbine as a pair of outcast Goths from the Trench Coat Mafia snapping and tearing through their high school hunting down jocks to settle a long-running feud. Almost none of that happened,” writes Cullen, a Denver-based journalist who has spent the past ten years investigating the 1999 attack. In fact, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold conceived of their act not as a targeted school shooting but as an elaborate three-part act of terrorism. First, propane bombs planted in the cafeteria would erupt during lunchtime, indiscriminately slaughtering hundreds of students. The killers, positioned outside the school’s main entrance, would then mow down fleeing survivors. Finally, after the media and rescue workers had arrived, timed bombs in the killers’ cars would explode, wiping out hundreds more. It was only when the bombs in the cafeteria failed to detonate that the killers entered the high school with sawed-off shotguns blazing. Drawing on a wealth of journals, videotapes, police reports and personal interviews, Cullen sketches multifaceted portraits of the killers and the surviving community. He portrays Harris as a calculating, egocentric psychopath, someone who labeled his journal “The Book of God” and harbored fantasies of exterminating the entire human race. In contrast, Klebold was a suicidal depressive, prone to fits of rage and extreme self-loathing. Together they forged a combustible and unequal alliance, with Harris channeling Klebold’s frustration and anger into his sadistic plans. The unnerving narrative is too often undermined by the author’s distracting tendency to weave the killers’ expressions into his sentences—for example, “The boys were shooting off their pipe bombs by then, and, man, were those things badass.” Cullen is better at depicting the attack’s aftermath. Poignant sections devoted to the survivors probe the myriad ways that individuals cope with grief and struggle to interpret and make sense of tragedy.
Carefully researched and chilling, if somewhat overwritten.Pub Date: April 6, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-446-54693-5
Page Count: 406
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Bias notwithstanding, particularly against what's called the "elites" of the legal profession, this is an intriguing look at...
A spirited account of how the relatively recent establishment of the Massachusetts School of Law struggled to survive despite the concentrated opposition of the American Bar Association.
In a style reminiscent of Tracy Kidder, freelance journalist Hagan conjures up a number of the colorful characters who helped launch MSL in the late '80s. Among the more flamboyant actors in this legal drama is Michael Boland, who founded MSL's immediate predecessor, the Commonwealth School of Law. Although it quickly shut down, due to Boland's mismanagement, he made at least one good move in hiring Lawrence Velvel as dean. By Hagan's account, Velvel, who has made a career out of his contrarian positions, was ideally suited to be dean of the fledgling school. After Commonwealth collapsed, Velvel and a cadre of motivated students formed MSL to take its place, offering a new model of legal education that targeted older, working-class students, offering them a practical education in the nuts-and-bolts of practice. With Boland out of the picture, Velvel and his partners still encountered opposition from the ABA, which refused to accredit the school. The central charge here against the ABA is that it seeks to maintain the status quo of the legal profession by stifling innovation and denying an affordable legal education to non-traditional students. Although MSL went as far as bringing an antitrust suit against the organization, it never received the accreditation it needed for perceived legitimacy. Nonetheless, Hagan, whose subjective viewpoint should be assumed, highlights what she considers the school's successes. (MSL, not Hagan, holds the copyright to the book–it's certainly a good piece of recruitment material.)
Bias notwithstanding, particularly against what's called the "elites" of the legal profession, this is an intriguing look at the near-insurmountable hurdles in creating a new breed of law school.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7618-2838-9
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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