Accomplished plotting teams up with a winsome narrator to give readers a bewitching story.
An inexperienced 15-year-old witch struggles to establish her ethics as she fights to save fellow high school students from the predations of older wicked witches.
When Camellia’s witch mother, Sarmine, (both white) invites three racially diverse witch friends over, ostensibly as a reunion of an old college Do-Badders Club, Cam is horrified when they decide to resume their antics and select Cam’s fellow high school students as victims. The challenge? The witch who makes her victim the most miserable over the course of a week is the winner. To thwart them, Cam bets the witches she can undo their work, but there are problems: she doesn’t know which students are the victims, she barely knows any spells, and she refuses to use any spells that contain animal ingredients—which, unfortunately, are most of them. If that weren’t bad enough, the ante gets upped considerably when Cam discovers the real reason most-evil-witch Malkin suggested the challenge in the first place. Cam’s flippant first-person narrative rises above teen boilerplate due to the intelligence, vulnerability, and self-deprecating humor she displays. Connolly’s first-rate plotting delivers a clever story that empathizes with the self-conscious teen world even as it pokes a tiny bit of well-meaning fun.
Accomplished plotting teams up with a winsome narrator to give readers a bewitching story. (appendix) (Fantasy. 13-16)Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-7653-8375-4
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
An enjoyable, if predictable, romantic holiday story.
Is an exuberant extended family the cure for a breakup? Sophie is about to find out.
When Sophie unexpectedly breaks up with her boyfriend, she isn’t thrilled about spending the holidays at her grandparents’ house instead of with him. And when her grandmother forms a plan to distract Sophie from her broken heart—10 blind dates, each set up by different family members—she’s even less thrilled. Everyone gets involved with the matchmaking, even forming a betting pool on the success of each date. But will Sophie really find someone to fill the space left by her ex? Will her ex get wind of Sophie’s dating spree via social media and want them to get back together? Is that what she even wants anymore? This is a fun story of finding love, getting to know yourself, and getting to know your family. The pace is quick and light, though the characters are fairly shallow and occasionally feel interchangeable, especially with so many names involved. A Christmas tale, the plot is a fast-paced series of dinners, parties, and games, relayed in both narrative form and via texts, though the humor occasionally feels stiff and overwrought. The ending is satisfying, though largely unsurprising. Most characters default to white as members of Sophie’s Italian American extended family, although one of her cousins has a Filipina mother. One uncle is gay.
An enjoyable, if predictable, romantic holiday story. (Fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-368-02749-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
A glossy repackaging of a jejune tale.
A reissue of the 2016 novel published as Consider.
Alexandra Lucas and her boyfriend, Dominick, are about to start their senior year of high school when 500 vertexes—each one a doorway-shaped “hole into the fabric of the universe”—appear across the world, accompanied by holographic messages communicating news of Earth’s impending doom. The only escape is a one-way trip through the portals to a parallel future Earth. As people leave through the vertexes and the extinction event draws nearer, the world becomes increasingly unfamiliar. A lot has changed in the past several years, including expectations of mental health depictions in young adult literature; Alex’s struggle with anxiety and reliance on Ativan, which she calls her “little white savior” while initially discounting therapy as an intervention, make for a trite after-school special–level treatment of a complex situation; a short stint of effective therapy does finally occur but is so limited in duration that it contributes to the oversimplification of the topic. Alex also has unresolved issues with her Gulf War veteran father (who possibly grapples with PTSD). The slow pace of the plot as it depicts a crumbling society, along with stilted writing and insubstantial secondary characterization, limits the appeal of such a small-scale, personal story. Characters are minimally described and largely racially ambiguous; Alex has golden skin and curly brown hair.
A glossy repackaging of a jejune tale. (Science fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 978-1-72826-839-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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