A measured, affecting look at a struggling and burdened teenager.
A talented Philadelphia high school swimmer with a bleak family life turns up missing in Schiller’s (Even if Your Heart Would Listen, 2019) dark melodrama.
After a New Year’s Eve party to usher in 1993, Angel Ferente doesn’t make it home. Angel is a senior at Kennedy Academic High School, where she’s a star on the swim team. The team also includes her best friend, Alex Williamson, and her “sometimes boyfriend,” Jamal Joyner. Her home life, however, is troubling. Her mother, Rita, who goes by “Pic,” has spent time in rehab and, several years prior, lost custody of Angel and her little sister, Jeannine. But now the girls live with Pic and her spiteful, unemployed husband, Frank, along with the couple’s young daughters, Kathleen and Joy. Before she disappeared, Angel had been caring for the other girls in between seemingly endless arguments with Pic and Frank. Though Angel has run away in the past, as when she suddenly left to see her biological father in New Jersey, Alex and Jeannine are worried because no one has any idea where she has gone. While some in the Philly community search for the missing teen, her friends and family can only hope that someone will find Angel—and that she’s still alive. Schiller’s tale, told through the alternating narrative perspectives of Alex and Jeannine, is an absorbing character study of Angel as well as of Jeannine. Both narrators provide insight into Angel, who uses swimming less for personal achievement and more as an escape from the home that occasionally leaves her with visible bruises. But readers learn just as much about Jeannine, an exceptionally smart girl whom many disregard because she rarely speaks in public. The author balances the generally somber story with amiable characters, from tough but compassionate swim coach “CJ” Rhodes to Alex’s mom, Claire, who’s a teacher at the same school. The tight, unembellished prose makes for an easy read and even adds a hint of mystery, as readers know neither Angel’s fate nor the identity of the person sending her anonymous, suggestive letters.
A measured, affecting look at a struggling and burdened teenager.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-68463-036-3
Page Count: 278
Publisher: Spark Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.
A woman accused of shooting her husband six times in the face refuses to speak.
"Alicia Berenson was thirty-three years old when she killed her husband. They had been married for seven years. They were both artists—Alicia was a painter, and Gabriel was a well-known fashion photographer." Michaelides' debut is narrated in the voice of psychotherapist Theo Faber, who applies for a job at the institution where Alicia is incarcerated because he's fascinated with her case and believes he will be able to get her to talk. The narration of the increasingly unrealistic events that follow is interwoven with excerpts from Alicia's diary. Ah, yes, the old interwoven diary trick. When you read Alicia's diary you'll conclude the woman could well have been a novelist instead of a painter because it contains page after page of detailed dialogue, scenes, and conversations quite unlike those in any journal you've ever seen. " 'What's the matter?' 'I can't talk about it on the phone, I need to see you.' 'It's just—I'm not sure I can make it up to Cambridge at the minute.' 'I'll come to you. This afternoon. Okay?' Something in Paul's voice made me agree without thinking about it. He sounded desperate. 'Okay. Are you sure you can't tell me about it now?' 'I'll see you later.' Paul hung up." Wouldn't all this appear in a diary as "Paul wouldn't tell me what was wrong"? An even more improbable entry is the one that pins the tail on the killer. While much of the book is clumsy, contrived, and silly, it is while reading passages of the diary that one may actually find oneself laughing out loud.
Amateurish, with a twist savvy readers will see coming from a mile away.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-30169-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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