Time: one month after September 11, 2001. Place: Northern Afghanistan. Enter 12-year-old Najmah, abandoned when her father and brother are taken away at gunpoint to fight for the Taliban and, soon after, her mother and baby brother die in an air attack. Then, enter Nusrat, a fair-haired New Yorker who has been living and teaching in Pakistan’s Peshawar since her husband Faiz decided to work for an Afghan clinic. Through shifting points of view in alternating sections, readers learn about young Najmah’s dangerous journey to a refugee camp, and of Nusrat’s nagging worry about her husband from whom she’s not heard in far too long. Najmah and Nusrat’s stories collide when Najmah makes her way to Peshawar in search of her family and is taken to Nusrat, the American who teaches refugees under a persimmon tree. Together, they yearn for lost loved ones, discuss the nature of the stars they both adore and follow their hearts the best they can. Staples brings beautiful, war-torn Afghanistan closer in this affecting, eye-opening novel. (map, author’s note, glossary) (Fiction. 12+)
Pub Date: Aug. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-38025-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
A teen questions the world his father has created and finds some shocking answers. Fifteen-year-old Eli and his family live in the Compound, a state-of-the-art underground shelter designed by their billionaire father to withstand a nuclear attack and protect them for the “next fifteen years in luxurious comfort.” After six years of isolation, Eli still thinks about his twin brother Eddy and his grandmother, who were “accidentally” left behind the fateful night his father herded everyone else into the Compound and locked the door. Eli wonders why his mother keeps producing children, why his father stays in his locked study and why certain supplies are running out. When Eli unexpectedly connects to the Internet, he discovers his father has sealed them away from the real world. As his awareness of reality grows, Eli matures from a callow kid into a caring person who knows it’s up to him to save his family. Suspenseful and riveting, this debut novel raises serious issues about what it means to survive. (Fiction. 12+)
Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37015-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
Whether you came for the lore or the love, perfection.
Broken people, complicated families, magic, and Faerie politics: Black’s back.
After the tumultuous ending to the last volume (marriage, exile, and the seeming collapse of all her plots), Jude finds herself in the human world, which lacks appeal despite a childhood spent longing to go back. The price of her upbringing becomes clear: A human raised in the multihued, multiformed, always capricious Faerie High Court by the man who killed her parents, trained for intrigue and combat, recruited to a spy organization, and ultimately the power behind the coup and the latest High King, Jude no longer understands how to exist happily in a world that isn’t full of magic and danger. A plea from her estranged twin sends her secretly back to Faerie, where things immediately come to a boil with Cardan (king, nemesis, love interest) and all the many political strands Jude has tugged on for the past two volumes. New readers will need to go back to The Cruel Prince (2018) to follow the complexities—political and personal side plots abound—but the legions of established fans will love every minute of this lushly described, tightly plotted trilogy closer. Jude might be traumatized and emotionally unhealthy, but she’s an antihero worth cheering on. There are few physical descriptions of humans and some queer representation.
Whether you came for the lore or the love, perfection. (Fantasy. 14-adult)Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-31042-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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