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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Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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