A cursory examination of grief that culminates in a feel-good read.
After losing his mother, a bereft middle school boy decides to form a band.
Terence Kato has had a horrible year: his mother has died; his dad is depressed and spends most days in bed; and he’s had to leave his exclusive private art school for the public one. At Franklin Middle School—where music is an extracurricular—Terence decides to form his own band, although, constrained by his grief, he is determined not to make actual friends. He meets Eddie, a girl with “dark skin, short hair, and a suspicious golden piercing in her nose.” Eddie is a singer, and over time, she helps him meet the other members that eventually compose their band, the PA Quintet. The group decides to enter a battle-of-the-bands contest only to discover that their competition is none other than Terence’s old classmates from his former school. Terence’s pain is palpable but only on a surface level; Brezenoff’s tale never takes a deep dive into any great character development and keeps readers at arm’s length with its third-person, present-tense narration. This aside, the plotting is light and breezy, and while predictable, the story is comfortably uplifting. Music fans will delight in (and most likely run to look up) the dizzying array of musicians mentioned. Though Terence has a common Japanese surname, there is little sense of Japanese identity in the book.
A cursory examination of grief that culminates in a feel-good read. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62370-853-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Capstone Young Readers
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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A beautiful, moving mythological adventure.
In a world based on Greek mythology, a 12-year-old aspires to be a Ferryer of the dead but gets off track when she meets a Living girl who’s found her way into the Underworld.
All Senka knows is her existence on an island in the middle of the Acheron River, “smack between the realm of the Living and the realm of the Dead,” where she’s the ward of Charon, the Ferryer of souls. Her teacher is an enormous raven named Mortimer. After Senka, who presents white, learns the Rules for Ferryers, Charon agrees to her repeated requests and starts training her to become a Ferryer. But when an emergency leads to Senka’s being left alone, she disobeys Charon’s explicit orders, takes the boat out on her own—and quickly learns that ferrying souls is far more complicated than she realized. She encounters dark-haired, brown-skinned Poppy, whose “edges are crisp”—she’s a Living girl who will sacrifice anything to find Joey, her younger brother who died. As Senka tries to convince Poppy to return to the Shore of the Living, the two get stuck in the Underwild, a “lawless place where chaos reigns” that’s filled with innumerable dangers and shrouded in secrets. Senka’s lively first-person narration relates the unexpected friendship that forms through her shared adventures with Poppy as they face mortality and the unknown. Debut author Targosz offers readers a meaningful exploration of grief and its impact on those left behind.
A beautiful, moving mythological adventure. (Fantasy. 9-13)Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781665957632
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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