An intriguing hybrid fantasy that mixes life on the street with magic and glimpses of unworldly beauty. Not far in the future, Faerie returns to the sight of man while a once-conservative human city becomes Bordertown, where young elves and humans alike escape their various homes and rules. Bordertown is dangerous, filled with gangs from both species, rife with magic, drugs, violence. Still, it lures more and more youngsters, including thin-skinned, tough-talking Ron Starbuck, who reads Yeats and pretends to know what's going on. Ron says he's looking for his brother Tony, but—as he enters Castle Pup under the wing of the unreliable half-breed Mooner and then finds himself a weapon of revenge against the woman who owns the bookstore called Elsewhere—we learn that Tony only meant to come to Bordertown. Ron's need to understand his brother's suicide and to regain a sense of self drives him through a series of muddled choices that he makes, and then tries to unmake. Filled with action, shifting images, and alienated characters looking for a place to belong, the adventure holds attention but doesn't entirely satisfy. Ron's motivation eventually becomes clear, yet he moves among mysterious, unfleshed-out characters who are often no more than cryptic hints—as is much of Faerie. Still, the ideas fascinate, Ron's fate matters, and this in an unusual view of the streets. (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-15-200731-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1991
Characters to love, quips to snort at, insights to ponder: typical Spinelli.
For two teenagers, a small town’s annual cautionary ritual becomes both a life- and a death-changing experience.
On the second Wednesday in June, every eighth grader in Amber Springs, Pennsylvania, gets a black shirt, the name and picture of a teen killed the previous year through reckless behavior—and the silent treatment from everyone in town. Like many of his classmates, shy, self-conscious Robbie “Worm” Tarnauer has been looking forward to Dead Wed as a day for cutting loose rather than sober reflection…until he finds himself talking to a strange girl or, as she would have it, “spectral maiden,” only he can see or touch. Becca Finch is as surprised and confused as Worm, only remembering losing control of her car on an icy slope that past Christmas Eve. But being (or having been, anyway) a more outgoing sort, she sees their encounter as a sign that she’s got a mission. What follows, in a long conversational ramble through town and beyond, is a day at once ordinary yet rich in discovery and self-discovery—not just for Worm, but for Becca too, with a climactic twist that leaves both ready, or readier, for whatever may come next. Spinelli shines at setting a tongue-in-cheek tone for a tale with serious underpinnings, and as in Stargirl (2000), readers will be swept into the relationship that develops between this adolescent odd couple. Characters follow a White default.
Characters to love, quips to snort at, insights to ponder: typical Spinelli. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-30667-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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
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