A highly readable though flawed twist on the classic star-crossed lovers plot.
Sparks—both romantic and cultural—fly when Hasidic Devorah and Jaxon, the son of West Indian immigrants, meet on a hospital elevator stuck between floors during a hurricane.
This chance flirtation fans a tiny flame of doubt into a wildfire. Devorah knows she doesn’t want to live out her parents’ vision of the future: a highly circumscribed yet loving life of faith and family in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Devorah begins lying to her parents and sneaking around their rules to spend more time with Jaxon, falling for him hard and thinking that a relationship with him would help her avoid entering an early, arranged marriage and inevitable motherhood. But her suspicious, holier-than-thou brother-in-law, Jacob, seems intent on catching Devorah in the wrong. Meanwhile, Jaxon thrills to the romance of their shared secret, laboring over a heartfelt mix CD and devising detailed plans for a date that won’t break the rules of sabbath. The novel is by no means perfect: Jacob’s villainy is positively clichéd, and the number of factual missteps throughout (by tradition, Devorah would not have been named for a living grandmother and would never call that grandmother a shiksa, for example) render the narrative troubling and unreliable. The story is most successful in the scenes between the protagonists and their respective families, which readers will note are more similar than they are different.
A highly readable though flawed twist on the classic star-crossed lovers plot. (Fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: July 24, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59514-674-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Razorbill/Penguin
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Within the standard-issue teen romance is a heartfelt, wryly perceptive account of coming to terms with irrevocable loss...
Jessie’s unassimilated grief over her mother’s death makes her dad’s abrupt marriage to Rachel, a wealthy widow he met online, and their subsequent move from Chicago to her mansion in Los Angeles feel like betrayal.
Rachel’s son wants nothing to do with Jessie. Her first week at his private school is agonizing. When she gets an email from “Somebody Nobody,” claiming to be a male student in the school and offering to act as her “virtual spirit guide,” Jessie’s suspicious, but she accepts—she needs help. SN’s a smart, funny, supportive guide, advising her whom to befriend and whom to avoid while remaining stubbornly anonymous. Meanwhile, Jessie makes friends, is picked as study partner by the coolest guy in AP English, and finds a job in a bookstore, working with the owner’s son, Liam. But questions abound. Why is Liam’s girlfriend bullying her? What should she do about SN now that she’s crushing on study-partner Ethan? Readers will have answers long before Jessie does. It’s overfamiliar territory: a protagonist unaware she’s gorgeous, oblivious to male admiration; a jealous, mean-girl antagonist; a secret admirer, easily identified. It’s the authentic depiction of grief—how Jessie and other characters respond to loss, get stuck, struggle to break through—devoid of cliché, that will keep readers engaged. Though one of Jessie’s friends has a Spanish surname, rich, beautiful, mostly white people are the order of the day.
Within the standard-issue teen romance is a heartfelt, wryly perceptive account of coming to terms with irrevocable loss when life itself means inevitable change. (Fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-53564-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2016
Not so much one story as three (with a spectral onlooker); fans of the original may enjoy picking out the tweaks.
The March family marches on…in 1942.
Taking Beth, Jo, Meg, and Amy as point-of-view characters, the authorial quartet begins this spinoff with Beth dead but contributing free verse observations between chapters and the surviving sisters estranged. In the least developed storyline, Meg stays home, flirting briefly with being unfaithful to absent fellow teacher and beau John. Jo stalks off to work as a riveter in an airplane factory and (confirming the speculations of generations of nuance-sensitive readers) discovers her queerness. True to character, Amy lies about both her age and her admission to art school in Montreal so she can secretly join the Red Cross and is shipped off to London—where she runs into and falls for wounded airman Laurie. Though linked to the original by names, themes (notably the outwardly calm, saintly Marmee’s admission of inner anger, which is reflected here in her daughters), and incidents that are similar in type, there are enough references to period details to establish a weak sense of setting. Giving Meg and Amy chances to reflect on their racial attitudes through the introduction of a Japanese American student and, in a single quick encounter, a Black serviceman feels perfunctory given the otherwise all-White cast. Jo’s slower ride to self-knowledge, though heavily foreshadowed, comes off as more authentic. If the sisters’ eventual fence-mending is predictable, it’s also refreshingly acerbic.
Not so much one story as three (with a spectral onlooker); fans of the original may enjoy picking out the tweaks. (Historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-37259-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
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