A thoughtful, well-drawn legal thriller with teen tribulation at its center.
Kemanis (Love & Crimes, 2017, etc.) sets an intrepid prosecutor up against some high school drama with deadly consequences in this latest Dana Hargrove legal thriller.
Westchester County, New York, 2009: The new district attorney, Hargrove, takes office just as the adverse effects of the Great Recession—unemployment, domestic abuse, increased levels of substance abuse—start to take hold in her jurisdiction. Then the frozen body of a teen suicide is discovered in the Hudson River; it’s Naomi Steuben, a shy, overweight girl who’d recently been the victim of vicious online bullying by two classmates. Her grieving parents pressure the DA’s office to deliver justice, and Hargrove and her team must figure out how to prosecute the case without any cyberbullying laws on the books. As the attorneys—Hargrove; her husband, Evan Goodhue; and their rival Vesma Krumins—struggle to work within the law, the Hargroves’ kids, Travis and Natalie Goodhue, and Vesma’s daughter, Ginger, endure the petty and sometimes-harmful world of high school. Natalie is forced to testify against her peers, which has consequences for her entire family. Hargrove may not be able to keep her kids safe from the world’s tragedies, but she’ll do whatever she can to make sure justice is served. Kemanis writes in a style that adeptly dramatizes legal arguments while also finding moments of stark lyricism, as when she describes the moment just before Naomi’s wintry death: “With all physical sensation gone, the rest of it is now almost a memory, not even that. The remaining bits float away into the vast, sucking expanse of black sky over the river.” Although court cases figure heavily into the novel’s plot, the author manages to transcend the genre somewhat by delving so deeply into the lives of the teenage characters and their social circle. The result is a novel about how communities contend with their children’s coming-of-age, particularly in an era when technology is shifting the ground beneath everyone’s feet.
A thoughtful, well-drawn legal thriller with teen tribulation at its center.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9997850-0-3
Page Count: 350
Publisher: Opus Nine Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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