Although hardly an insightful examination of brotherly problems, ample basketball play-by-play makes this a more attractive...
Seventh-grade fraternal twins Russ and Owen (Athlete vs. Mathlete, 2013) return for a second outing, once again exploring in alternating first-person voices the differences between brothers as filtered through their basketball experiences.
Russ, the brainiac, and Owen, his athletically focused twin, are now getting along better, both doing their parts to make sure their basketball team has a winning season. Things are going well until the coach invites a pair of newcomers, identical twins Marcus and Mitch, to join the team midseason. These twins dress and act alike and have little interest in making friends outside their comfortable but seriously limiting brotherly relationship. Worse, they’re gifted athletically and academically, creating competition with both Russ and Owen, and the coach is giving them plenty of court time, which leaves Owen feeling especially jealous and very resentful. Remarkably, he even contemplates hurting one of the twins to save his place on the team. It takes an accidental injury that sidelines Marcus to expose the weaknesses the identical duo share and quite a lot of prompting from the more mature Russ and other teammates to get Owen to put the team’s needs before his own feelings. Once that’s accomplished, a too-easy resolution neatly wraps up the conflict.
Although hardly an insightful examination of brotherly problems, ample basketball play-by-play makes this a more attractive offering for reluctant readers. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-61963-129-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember.
Kai’s life is upended when his coastal village is devastated in Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami in this verse novel from an author who experienced them firsthand.
With his single mother, her parents, and his friend Ryu among the thousands missing or dead, biracial Kai, 17, is dazed and disoriented. His friend Shin’s supportive, but his intact family reminds Kai, whose American dad has been out of touch for years, of his loss. Kai’s isolation is amplified by his uncertain cultural status. Playing soccer and his growing friendship with shy Keiko barely lessen his despair. Then he’s invited to join a group of Japanese teens traveling to New York to meet others who as teenagers lost parents in the 9/11 attacks a decade earlier. Though at first reluctant, Kai agrees to go and, in the process, begins to imagine a future. Like graphic novels, today’s spare novels in verse (the subgenre concerning disasters especially) are significantly shaped by what’s left out. Lacking art’s visceral power to grab attention, verse novels may—as here—feel sparsely plotted with underdeveloped characters portrayed from a distance in elegiac monotone. Kai’s a generic figure, a coat hanger for the disaster’s main event, his victories mostly unearned; in striking contrast, his rural Japanese community and how they endure catastrophe and overwhelming losses—what they do and don’t do for one another, comforts they miss, kindnesses they value—spring to life.
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember. (author preface, afterword) (Verse fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-53474-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
A satisfying story of family, friendship and small-town cooperation in a 21st-century world.
Sent to stay with octogenarian relatives for the summer, 14-year-old Mike ends up coordinating a community drive to raise $40,000 for the adoption of a Romanian orphan. He’ll never be his dad's kind of engineer, but he learns he’s great at human engineering.
Mike’s math learning disability is matched by his widower father's lack of social competence; the Giant Genius can’t even reliably remember his son’s name. Like many of the folks the boy comes to know in Do Over, Penn.—his great-uncle Poppy silent in his chair, the multiply pierced-and-tattooed Gladys from the bank and “a homeless guy” who calls himself Past—Mike feels like a failure. But in spite of his own lack of confidence, he provides the kick start they need to cope with their losses and contribute to the campaign. Using the Internet (especially YouTube), Mike makes use of town talents and his own webpage design skills and entrepreneurial imagination. Math-definition chapter headings (Compatible Numbers, Zero Property, Tessellations) turn out to apply well to human actions in this well-paced, first-person narrative. Erskine described Asperger’s syndrome from the inside in Mockingbird (2010). Here, it’s a likely cause for the rift between father and son touchingly mended at the novel's cinematic conclusion.
A satisfying story of family, friendship and small-town cooperation in a 21st-century world. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: June 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-25505-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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