A tale where the heroine’s experiences as a grieving daughter and sister seem far more meaningful than any family secrets.
A teenager must unravel the mysteries behind her family’s many tragedies in this first installment of a YA trilogy.
Anastasia Phoenix has had more than her fair share of uncertainty and misfortune. Her parents were biochemical engineers who created the Dresden Chemical Corporation with their best friend. But their work meant they often dragged Anastasia and her older sister, Keira, from country to country, never settling in one place for long. After Anastasia finds out that they plan to uproot the family again mere months after settling in Boston, she refuses to move. She gets her wish in the worst way possible: her parents die, leaving her Keira’s ward and ensuring she won’t be relocating soon. Now, three years later, Anastasia is 17, and Keira has disappeared after a party. Though the crime scene contains enough blood that it seems doubtful that Keira survived, Anastasia is sure she is alive. Anastasia finds evidence pointing her toward an Italian family that knows her parents—and suggests that there is more to their deaths than she realizes. Along with Marcus Rey, an attractive new student and son of Dresden Chemical employees, she travels to Italy to try to discover information about her family. While there, she learns about her parents’ clandestine past. But the more she unearths, the more she apprehends that few people in her life are who she thinks they are. Though Rodriguez Wallach (Mirror, Mirror, 2013, etc.) spices up her novel with exotic locales and intriguing love interests, the tale is ultimately more predictable than exciting. In trying to give her audience hints, the author overemphasizes certain clues and characters until readers have almost certainly guessed plot twists many chapters before they are meant to be revealed. Anastasia also emerges as an uneven character, teetering between believable—as a grieving, bullheaded teenager trying to navigate the guilt of enjoying a new crush while also investigating her sister and parents—and too good to be true. She’s fluent in four languages, a karate black belt, able to identify someone’s city of origin by hearing the person speak a single word, and lucky to have a twentysomething roommate who can hack police databases in under an hour.
A tale where the heroine’s experiences as a grieving daughter and sister seem far more meaningful than any family secrets.Pub Date: March 7, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-63375-608-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Entangled Teen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Aspiring filmmaker/first-novelist Chbosky adds an upbeat ending to a tale of teenaged angst—the right combination of realism and uplift to allow it on high school reading lists, though some might object to the sexuality, drinking, and dope-smoking. More sophisticated readers might object to the rip-off of Salinger, though Chbosky pays homage by having his protagonist read Catcher in the Rye. Like Holden, Charlie oozes sincerity, rails against celebrity phoniness, and feels an extraliterary bond with his favorite writers (Harper Lee, Fitzgerald, Kerouac, Ayn Rand, etc.). But Charlie’s no rich kid: the third child in a middle-class family, he attends public school in western Pennsylvania, has an older brother who plays football at Penn State, and an older sister who worries about boys a lot. An epistolary novel addressed to an anonymous “friend,” Charlie’s letters cover his first year in high school, a time haunted by the recent suicide of his best friend. Always quick to shed tears, Charlie also feels guilty about the death of his Aunt Helen, a troubled woman who lived with Charlie’s family at the time of her fatal car wreck. Though he begins as a friendless observer, Charlie is soon pals with seniors Patrick and Sam (for Samantha), stepsiblings who include Charlie in their circle, where he smokes pot for the first time, drops acid, and falls madly in love with the inaccessible Sam. His first relationship ends miserably because Charlie remains compulsively honest, though he proves a loyal friend (to Patrick when he’s gay-bashed) and brother (when his sister needs an abortion). Depressed when all his friends prepare for college, Charlie has a catatonic breakdown, which resolves itself neatly and reveals a long-repressed truth about Aunt Helen. A plain-written narrative suggesting that passivity, and thinking too much, lead to confusion and anxiety. Perhaps the folks at (co-publisher) MTV see the synergy here with Daria or any number of videos by the sensitive singer-songwriters they feature.
Pub Date: Feb. 4, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-02734-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: MTV Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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