An incendiary tale featuring mythic and realistic elements.
A girl whose skin is black on the right side of her body, white on the left, becomes a magical figure in an apocalyptic future in this YA fantasy novel.
A full-on race war rages across a near-future America, pitting black and white Americans against one another: “There was no African American anymore, no Asian, no Native American, and no more Hispanic or Middle Eastern people. If you weren’t white, you were black.” The assassination of a far-right president by a militant black separatist leads to a police-state climate, resulting in murders, arrests, and mass incarcerations of black people in cities across the country. For Jetta, a sheltered 14-year-old girl in New Orleans, the horrors are particularly personal; she was inexplicably born half-white, half-black. When she was an infant, firefighters and paramedics barely rescued her from a deadly church-burning by neo-Nazis. Raised by her loving grandmother in a black household, she’s considered freakish by both militant factions; as a result, she customarily hides the white side of her face under a hoodie in public. The genocidal destruction of a New Orleans neighborhood makes Jetta a fugitive; Tyler, another resilient survivor whose brother is a fighter for a black nation-state, accompanies her. Jetta’s other traveling companions include the friendly ghosts of her grandmother and other slain friends, plus a cheerful, drum-playing drunk who, significantly, bears the name of an African storm god. In short, exciting chapters, prolific thriller writer Rose (Waltzing Matilda, 2018, etc.) spins an action-fantasy yarn with a hot-button premise that will strike some readers as urgently timely and others as being in questionable taste. As the story goes on, it moves away from gritty, gory descriptions of large-scale urban civil warfare and into magical-realism territory involving spirits and symbolic monsters, akin to those in Neil Gaiman’s 2001 fantasy novel, American Gods. Rose strives ambitiously to make a bigger metaphorical statement about the nature of human conflict, although it’s an unfocused one with an open-ended conclusion. Readers may find it easier to latch onto the story’s nightmarish left-versus-right mortal combat than its immortal deities wrestling with their destinies.
An incendiary tale featuring mythic and realistic elements.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973279-42-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
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