The author’s intended audience of young teenagers may really like this book—and also fall in love with its setting.
This short “mystery story for young teens” is a love letter to Maryland’s Eastern Shore, as seen through the eyes of two young boys and their stepfather.
Yaruta-Young’s (Many Happy Returns?, 2014) family goes back generations on the Eastern Shore. It’s one of those special places, like New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, that produce more mystery and quirkiness than locals can consume, so it has to be exported in books like this one. Max and his little brother, Charles, and their stepfather, Fred, are off for a guys’ weekend of crabbing. They’re a likable trio, and the first thing they come upon, in the middle of the oyster-shell road to Ellis Island, is an old lady holding a big snapping turtle by the tail. The mysterious Hattie Harriston pretty much forces the turtle on Fred and the boys in an effort to make sure that the creature gets to a place to lay her eggs. The group also discovers a graveyard that surprisingly contains a tombstone for Hattie Harriston. After a day’s successful crabbing, Fred and the boys head to the town of Vienna and check into the old Vienna Inn for the night. More memorable characters bob up, namely Miss Marie, the proprietor, and Miss Ruby, whose legendary restaurant is known only to the locals. (To say that these people are insular would be an understatement, but Fred has some local family ties.) A mystery needs a ghost story, and later that night Miss Marie (and Yaruta-Young) tell a doozy, involving young lovers eloping, haunting, and violent death—all connected to the Vienna Inn. Readers learn more crucial facts about Hattie Harriston, and about what finally happens to the snapping turtle; suffice it to say that the conclusion is tidy. One major strength of the book is its inclusion of details about such things as how to fish for crabs (“First you need to get one of those baskets—one that has an inner tube around it”) or a visit to the button factory, where workers make oyster-shell buttons for high-end fashions. Yaruta-Young tells a good story, and the descriptions of the Eastern Shore steal every scene.
The author’s intended audience of young teenagers may really like this book—and also fall in love with its setting.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9909380-5-7
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Secant Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
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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