The verse’s irregular, faltering beat matches Vera’s defensive grief well, but Vera herself retains an unlikable air of...
In first-person free verse with halting rhythm, 17-year-old Vera narrates her sojourn in a tiny desert town she’s never seen and doesn’t know.
Vera wants to be someplace unfamiliar, someplace that doesn’t invoke her younger sister, who died in a drunken ocean swim, nor her older sister, who’s tried to replace their absent mother but seems aloof, so she hitch hikes to the desert and gets out at Garrett, where "nobody knows me." Despite her obvious grief, Vera’s voice doesn’t easily inspire sympathy. In a mostly abandoned mining town characterized by “scraping-the-bean-can / unapologetic / starkness,” Vera squats in a deserted house and scoffs at the two part-time jobs she finds (“It’s certainly not what my once best friend Rob / would have called ‘rocket surgery’ ”). Mercantile owner Tilly lisps, her pronunciations mercilessly spelled out: “He’th an artitht! / Bowlth, jugth, plateth, / thellth it all it all on the Internet.” Vera crushes on Lon, a businessman whose Indian identity is frequently reiterated: “I glare at him, / leaning forward / having dumped the heaviest words / directly onto his black-feathered Native head.” Lon doesn’t live up to Vera’s expectations (“Frickin’ noncommunicating-handsome-half-Hopi,” she stews), and the text casts him as bad guy; only Milo the ceramicist is truly likable here.
The verse’s irregular, faltering beat matches Vera’s defensive grief well, but Vera herself retains an unlikable air of entitlement even as she moves on from the desert and back into her real life. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: June 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-670-01199-5
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
Characters to love, quips to snort at, insights to ponder: typical Spinelli.
For two teenagers, a small town’s annual cautionary ritual becomes both a life- and a death-changing experience.
On the second Wednesday in June, every eighth grader in Amber Springs, Pennsylvania, gets a black shirt, the name and picture of a teen killed the previous year through reckless behavior—and the silent treatment from everyone in town. Like many of his classmates, shy, self-conscious Robbie “Worm” Tarnauer has been looking forward to Dead Wed as a day for cutting loose rather than sober reflection…until he finds himself talking to a strange girl or, as she would have it, “spectral maiden,” only he can see or touch. Becca Finch is as surprised and confused as Worm, only remembering losing control of her car on an icy slope that past Christmas Eve. But being (or having been, anyway) a more outgoing sort, she sees their encounter as a sign that she’s got a mission. What follows, in a long conversational ramble through town and beyond, is a day at once ordinary yet rich in discovery and self-discovery—not just for Worm, but for Becca too, with a climactic twist that leaves both ready, or readier, for whatever may come next. Spinelli shines at setting a tongue-in-cheek tone for a tale with serious underpinnings, and as in Stargirl (2000), readers will be swept into the relationship that develops between this adolescent odd couple. Characters follow a White default.
Characters to love, quips to snort at, insights to ponder: typical Spinelli. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-30667-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember.
Kai’s life is upended when his coastal village is devastated in Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami in this verse novel from an author who experienced them firsthand.
With his single mother, her parents, and his friend Ryu among the thousands missing or dead, biracial Kai, 17, is dazed and disoriented. His friend Shin’s supportive, but his intact family reminds Kai, whose American dad has been out of touch for years, of his loss. Kai’s isolation is amplified by his uncertain cultural status. Playing soccer and his growing friendship with shy Keiko barely lessen his despair. Then he’s invited to join a group of Japanese teens traveling to New York to meet others who as teenagers lost parents in the 9/11 attacks a decade earlier. Though at first reluctant, Kai agrees to go and, in the process, begins to imagine a future. Like graphic novels, today’s spare novels in verse (the subgenre concerning disasters especially) are significantly shaped by what’s left out. Lacking art’s visceral power to grab attention, verse novels may—as here—feel sparsely plotted with underdeveloped characters portrayed from a distance in elegiac monotone. Kai’s a generic figure, a coat hanger for the disaster’s main event, his victories mostly unearned; in striking contrast, his rural Japanese community and how they endure catastrophe and overwhelming losses—what they do and don’t do for one another, comforts they miss, kindnesses they value—spring to life.
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember. (author preface, afterword) (Verse fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-53474-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
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