What high-school kid wants to be a freak, especially the kind who talks to dead people? Not Sparrow Delaney, which is why she’s keeping the secret from her family of seven women, all skilled mediums, that she can see and talk to ghosts. Evidently, as the seventh daughter of a seventh daughter, she has a special psychic gift, but when the ghost of a teenage boy appears to her in her classroom and pleads for her help, she can’t ignore him. The current abundance of supernatural and occult books usually have historical settings, but the clever twist in this offering casts Sparrow’s family in contemporary time in Lily Dale, N.Y., a Spiritualist community. Early references to thrift stores and computers clue the reader as modern trappings enhance the confrontations and dilemmas between the dearly departed and the visionary living. Idiosyncratic sisters (all named for birds by their ornithologist father who’s now missing), budding romance, a mysterious fatal accident and a live-wire grandmother all test Sparrow’s own spirit as she faces her destiny. Sparrow’s plight gives new meaning to “not a ghost of a chance”—an entertaining one. (Fiction. 12-16)
Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-06-113158-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2007
Solidly nonsmutty fare for readers who want to imagine they can get it right too.
With school pictures, a history pop quiz, a speech in front of the student body, and varsity softball tryouts, Ellie, a junior, finds herself repeating the same maddening day until she gets it right.
Not an original premise, Brody's theme is that one must not only learn how to be true to oneself, but figure out who are the people who truly matter and demonstrate affection. Parents, younger sister Hadley, and, most of all, best friend forever Owen have taken a back seat to the relationship with rock-star wannabe Tristan. Though the story follows the well-known romantic formula of good looks vs. forever friend, there is still plenty of entertainment along the way. Ellie is smart enough in the end to know some dreams belong to others and which dreams of her own she can abandon in order to move beyond the hitch in her universe. An oddly antique playlist of ’60s music serves as both background and chapter headings. No readers at all familiar with the plot device will be surprised as to the steps required to succeed and the ultimate outcome. Nonetheless, there are still some tender moments in this world of white, middle-class concerns, fittingly accompanied with only a hint of anything hotter than a kiss.
Solidly nonsmutty fare for readers who want to imagine they can get it right too. (Romance. 12-16)Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-38270-4
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
It’s hard to get invested in a love story when one of the partners is an unknowable black hole
Two teens are set on a collision course with sexy results.
Nicolette Holland is on the run. She’s changed her name and her hair and fully intends to disappear as fast as possible. Jack Manx, son of a mob big shot, is blackmailed into finding Nicolette and making sure no one else does. The circumstances revolving around Nicolette’s importance are a bit blurry: Jack is told she murdered a girl connected to a powerful crime boss, but Nicolette doesn’t act like a murderer, and the police aren’t on her tail. The story unfolds with alternating chapters switching between Jack’s and Nicolette’s present-tense accounts, but the different perspectives offer little to the narrative. There are no tense cat-and-mouse sequences here; Jack just finds his mark with little trouble. When the pair cross paths there’s a sexual attraction that promises to give emotional texture to the mob drama, but each character is so guarded that little genuine heat arises. Jack and Nicolette are manic in their moods, going from loving to hating and back to loving each other, sometimes within the span of one or two pages. Neither character is particularly engaging: Jack is a stereotypical bad boy with a heart of gold, and the mysterious nature of Nicolette’s past crime keeps her at arm’s length.
It’s hard to get invested in a love story when one of the partners is an unknowable black hole . (Thriller. 14-16)Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-4393-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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