An offbeat but clumsily didactic novel with an inspirational bent.
Troubled girls search for healthier perspectives in Jacobson’s magical-realist debut YA novel.
Two 17-year-olds from an unnamed city,Aurora and Stella, are camping out under the stars in a local park. The friends have specifically bonded over the fact that neither has a mother;Aurora lives in a foster home, while Stella lives with her grandfather. When Stella goes to visit a concession stand in the park, she finds a list with the word “Quest” written at the top of it: “Needs…not wants…,” it reads. “Faith, Confidence, Positive self-talk, Positive body image, To express gratitude, A passion, To be kind….” Aurora initially doesn’t think much of it, but Stella sees the “questlisting” as a set of instructions for what the girls must master to create better versions of themselves. Each day, the two try to figure out ways to achieve the list’s ideals, even as they run up against insecurities and past traumas. They get some help from new friends, including campground worker Pinky, activist Magdalena, and, in a whimsical turn, a tree that can speak and magically alter text. The novel is formatted as dialogue, with changing typefaces to reflect the characters’ personalities: an understated sans-serif for grounded Aurora, scriptlike italics for chatty Stella. The girls’ speech is always sharp and engaging, even if they rarely sound like girls their ages. Sometimes the voices seem much younger, and at others a bit older, as when Aurora bemoans social media culture in an IHOP restaurant: “the people seeing the selfie would think you IHOPpy-happy all the time. You’re not….Why are we compelled to do it?” The plot mainly serves as a means for Jacobson, a social entrepreneur and child advocate, to discuss motivational ideas, not all of which are original; for example, the girls tell each other the plots of Are You My Mother?(1960) by P.D. Eastman and The Giving Tree(1964) by Shel Silverstein. The book eventually reveals itself to have a decidedly Christian orientation, but the work feels too contrived to inspire much emotion or inspiration.
An offbeat but clumsily didactic novel with an inspirational bent.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-989059-78-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Ingenium Books Publishing
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Wrought with admirable skill—the emptiness and menace underlying this Utopia emerge step by inexorable step: a richly...
In a radical departure from her realistic fiction and comic chronicles of Anastasia, Lowry creates a chilling, tightly controlled future society where all controversy, pain, and choice have been expunged, each childhood year has its privileges and responsibilities, and family members are selected for compatibility.
As Jonas approaches the "Ceremony of Twelve," he wonders what his adult "Assignment" will be. Father, a "Nurturer," cares for "newchildren"; Mother works in the "Department of Justice"; but Jonas's admitted talents suggest no particular calling. In the event, he is named "Receiver," to replace an Elder with a unique function: holding the community's memories—painful, troubling, or prone to lead (like love) to disorder; the Elder ("The Giver") now begins to transfer these memories to Jonas. The process is deeply disturbing; for the first time, Jonas learns about ordinary things like color, the sun, snow, and mountains, as well as love, war, and death: the ceremony known as "release" is revealed to be murder. Horrified, Jonas plots escape to "Elsewhere," a step he believes will return the memories to all the people, but his timing is upset by a decision to release a newchild he has come to love. Ill-equipped, Jonas sets out with the baby on a desperate journey whose enigmatic conclusion resonates with allegory: Jonas may be a Christ figure, but the contrasts here with Christian symbols are also intriguing.
Wrought with admirable skill—the emptiness and menace underlying this Utopia emerge step by inexorable step: a richly provocative novel. (Fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 978-0-395-64566-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1993
Riveting, brutal and beautifully told.
A devastating tale of greed and secrets springs from the summer that tore Cady’s life apart.
Cady Sinclair’s family uses its inherited wealth to ensure that each successive generation is blond, beautiful and powerful. Reunited each summer by the family patriarch on his private island, his three adult daughters and various grandchildren lead charmed, fairy-tale lives (an idea reinforced by the periodic inclusions of Cady’s reworkings of fairy tales to tell the Sinclair family story). But this is no sanitized, modern Disney fairy tale; this is Cinderella with her stepsisters’ slashed heels in bloody glass slippers. Cady’s fairy-tale retellings are dark, as is the personal tragedy that has led to her examination of the skeletons in the Sinclair castle’s closets; its rent turns out to be extracted in personal sacrifices. Brilliantly, Lockhart resists simply crucifying the Sinclairs, which might make the family’s foreshadowed tragedy predictable or even satisfying. Instead, she humanizes them (and their painful contradictions) by including nostalgic images that showcase the love shared among Cady, her two cousins closest in age, and Gat, the Heathcliff-esque figure she has always loved. Though increasingly disenchanted with the Sinclair legacy of self-absorption, the four believe family redemption is possible—if they have the courage to act. Their sincere hopes and foolish naïveté make the teens’ desperate, grand gesture all that much more tragic.
Riveting, brutal and beautifully told. (Fiction. 14 & up)Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-74126-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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