The long-awaited conclusion to the trilogy begun with 1993’s Make Lemonade delivers on its promise. More than a year has passed since the events of True Believer (2001), and two summers of Summer Science have taught LaVaughn more than she ever could have learned at her underfunded inner-city school. Now she’s studying after school at WIMS: Women in Medical Science, a program created by Dr. Moore, an inner-city success story who’s returned to give poor girls the support she never had. LaVaughn works hard at WIMS, dreaming of one day becoming a nurse. But though LaVaughn is indebted to the program, she has suspicions about Dr. Moore’s history, suspicions that lead her into the conflict between what’s right and what’s necessary. In heartbreaking free-verse chapters, LaVaughn discovers that helpful adults are not perfect and that forgiveness is necessary even for the unforgivable. Despite the book’s oversimplification of religion and a conclusion that would seem pat if it were not so emotionally right, this portrayal of the dignity of poverty is quite the tearjerker. The audacity of hope, indeed. (Fiction. 13-15)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-158304-9
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Bowen Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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
An eighth grader discovers five schoolmates with psychic powers in this amateurish effort from Lubar. Martin, who was expelled from every other junior high in six counties for mouthing off, is consigned to prison-like Edgeview Alternative School, along with other violent or nerdy teens deemed hopeless misfits. While trying to avoid both the ready fists of hulking bully Lester Bloodbath and the shock therapy meted out by Principal Davis, he meets Torchy, who can start fires without matches or lighters, Cheater Woo, whose test answers are always identical to someone else’s, and several others with odd, unconscious talents. Interspersing Martin’s tediously self-analytical narrative with flat attempts at humor, trite student essays, repetitive memos to faculty, and mawkish letters from home, Lugar draws the tale to a paradoxical climax in which the self-styled “psi five” scuttle Bloodbath’s plot to close the school down, but then do their best to earn releases. After realizing that he is psychic, able to read people’s deepest fears and hopes, Martin abruptly acquires a sense of responsibility and resolves never to abuse his talent. Padded with aimless subplots and earnest efforts to drum up sympathy for the one-dimensional cast’s brutal bullies and ineffectual teachers, this contrived story is a weak alternative to Stephanie Tolan’s Welcome to the Ark (1996) or Willo Davis Roberts’s The Girl with the Silver Eyes (1980). (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86646-1
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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