Driven by plot and theme, this British import features a 12-year-old boy who discovers that angels right here on Earth are asking for his help in saving humanity from itself. Thomas Wisdom may be preppy and blonde, but he isn’t bland in the way his parents and sister seem to be, effortlessly gliding through their lives. His discovery that they are angels and he has been adopted propels Thomas into a search for his own origins. At the crux is the question of whether he will choose to remain human or give up free choice and join the angels, thereby agreeing to do whatever he is assigned. Never very convincing realistically, the presence of the US president chatting with Thomas verges on the ludicrous. Nevertheless, the earnest tone and the emotional outpouring of Thomas’s thought processes make clear that comedy was not intended. The way in which Blacker sets readers up with stereotypical assumptions about angels being blond and blank of character prior to yanking that away without any preparation in the story feels manipulative. It’s almost as though having given the clues to reinforce those assumptions he wants to blame readers for having made them. None of this is religious, as the angels are more like aliens than adherents to any God-given morality. It’s the plot twists and the possibilities of angel power that provide the suspense. What food there is here for discussion—free will, adoption, good and evil—is like most junk food: superficially appealing and not terribly satisfying. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-689-85171-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
When Clara Luna, 14, visits rural Mexico for the summer to visit the paternal grandparents she has never met, she cannot know her trip will involve an emotional and spiritual journey into her family’s past and a deep connection to a rich heritage of which she was barely aware. Long estranged from his parents, Clara’s father had entered the U.S. illegally years before, subsequently becoming a successful business owner who never spoke about what he left behind. Clara’s journey into her grandmother’s history (told in alternating chapters with Clara’s own first-person narrative) and her discovery that she, like her grandmother and ancestors, has a gift for healing, awakens her to the simple, mystical joys of a rural lifestyle she comes to love and wholly embrace. Painfully aware of not fitting into suburban teen life in her native Maryland, Clara awakens to feeling alive in Mexico and realizes a sweet first love with Pedro, a charming goat herder. Beautifully written, this is filled with evocative language that is rich in imagery and nuance and speaks to the connections that bind us all. Add a thrilling adventure and all the makings of an entrancing read are here. (glossaries) (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-73343-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
This is a minor quibble with a story that imagines so clearly for American readers the travails of all-too-many Latin...
A 12-year-old girl bears witness to the Dominican Revolution of 1961 in a powerful first-person narrative.
The story opens as Anita’s cousins (the Garcia girls of Alvarez’s 1991 adult debut, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents), hurriedly pack to leave the country. This signals the end of childhood innocence for Anita. In short succession, her family finds the secret police parked in their driveway; the American consul moves in next door; and her older sister Lucinda is packed off to join her cousins in New York after she attracts the unwelcome attention of El Jefe Trujillo, the country’s dictator. Anita’s family, it seems, is intimately involved with the political resistance to Trujillo, and she, perforce, is drawn into the emotional maelstrom. The present-tense narrative lends the story a gripping immediacy, as Anita moves from the healthy, self-absorbed naïveté of early adolescence to a prematurely aged understanding of the world’s brutality. Her entree into puberty goes hand in hand with her entree into this adult world of terror: “I don’t want to be a señorita now that I know what El Jefe does to señoritas.” According to an author’s note, Alvarez (How Tía Lola Came to Visit Stay, 2001, etc.) drew upon the experiences of family members who stayed behind in the Dominican Republic during this period of political upheaval, crafting a story that, in its matter-of-fact detailing of the increasingly surreal world surrounding Anita, feels almost realer than life. The power of the narrative is weakened somewhat by the insertion of Anita’s diary entries as she and her mother take shelter in the Italian Embassy after her father’s arrest. The first-person, present-tense construction of the diary entries are not different enough from the main narrative to make them come alive as such; instead, the artifice draws attention to itself, creating a distraction.
This is a minor quibble with a story that imagines so clearly for American readers the travails of all-too-many Latin nations then and now. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-81544-9
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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