A fresh, subtle take on timeless verities for young readers.
That most primal of ordeals–a lousy round of golf–imparts life lessons to a callow adolescent in this winsome coming-of-age fable.
When their mom nags him and his little brother Matt into signing up for a kids’ golf tournament, 14-year-old Sam Parma couldn’t be more put out. Golf, Sam reasons, is a game for fuddy-duddies, and with his hand-me-down ladies’ clubs he’ll hardly cut a fine figure, even on the ratty municipal course. Sam’s foursome is a panoply of irksome idiosyncrasies, including foul-mouthed Buzzy, who lies regularly about his score; hulking hooligan Mark, who’d rather drive his ball through a nearby house’s windowpane than into the cup; and rich-kid Chad, who’s actually a nice guy and an annoyingly good golfer. Once on the links, Sam suffers the trials of Job. He’s ambushed by sand traps and water hazards; his 3-wood disintegrates mid-swing; he has a scary run-in with what appears to be a one-armed fiend while searching for a lost ball; and his flubbing of two easy putts gets immortalized by a local TV-news crew. Trailing the cheating Buzzy and marauding Mark, crying out for justice and receiving none from the indifferent powers-that-be, Sam veers perilously close to the moral rough. Slipped into Rosa’s lighthearted tale is a serious exploration of the moral dilemmas faced by these quirky, appealing teen characters. A few sermonettes–“Improper grammar and verbal miscues create barriers for many people and prevent them from higher levels of achievement”–seem canned and a bit off. But most of the precepts Sam learns–lonely are the brave; it’s not whether you win or lose, but how you play the game; with a little luck and a lot of concentration, once in a while you can hit par–fall gracefully from the story.
A fresh, subtle take on timeless verities for young readers.Pub Date: March 18, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-60528-002-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
A celebratory song of the sea.
A shrimpy 13-year-old with a super-sized passion for marine life comes of age during a summer of discovery on the tidal flats of Puget Sound.
Miles O’Malley—Squid Boy to his friends—doesn’t mind being short. It’s other things that keep him awake at night, like his parents’ talk of divorce and his increasingly lustful thoughts about the girl next door. Mostly, though, it’s the ocean’s siren call that steals his sleep. During one of his moonlit kayak excursions, Miles comes across the rarest sighting ever documented in the northern Pacific: the last gasp of a Giant Squid. Scientists are stunned. The media descend. As Miles continues to stumble across other oddball findings, including two invasive species that threaten the eco-balance of Puget Sound, a nearby new-age cult’s interest in Miles prompts a headline in USA Today: Kid Messiah? Soon tourists are flocking to the tidal flats, crushing crustaceans underfoot and painting their bodies with black mud. Dodging disingenuous journalists, deluded disciples and the death-throes of his parents’ marriage, Miles tries to recapture some semblance of normality. He reads up on the G-spot and the Kama Sutra to keep pace with his pals’ bull sessions about sex (hilariously contributing “advanced” details that gross the other boys out). But Miles’s aquatic observations cannot be undone, and as summer draws to a close, inhabitants of Puget Sound prepare for a national blitzkrieg of media and scientific attention and the highest tide in 40 years, all of which threatens everything Miles holds dear. On land, the rickety plot could have used some shoring up. Miles is just too resourceful for the reader to believe his happiness—or that of those he loves—is ever at stake. But when Miles is on the water, Lynch’s first novel becomes a stunning light show, both literal, during phosphorescent plankton blooms, and metaphorical, in the poetic fireworks Lynch’s prose sets off as he describes his clearly beloved Puget Sound.
A celebratory song of the sea.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-605-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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