A quiet exploration of synesthesia, music, and family history.
Going on strike gives a synesthetic musical prodigy space in her life to learn the music of her Jewish heritage.
Two things control 12-year-old Rosie’s life: 1. Her unusual brain, with its full-sensory synesthesia, echoic musical memory, and exceptional violin talent; 2. her imperious stage mother. After her overpacked schedule causes Rosie to lose her only friend, she stops playing violin. Refusing music camp, she perforce accompanies her frustrated mother to her grandparents’ for the summer—without devices as punishment. Connecticut offers a fresh start. Alongside secretly watching improv classes at the public library and swimming with her grandfather, Rosie learns about her Hungarian Jewish family history. Most intriguingly, through some time-travel anomaly, she encounters a girl she realizes is her mother. Shanna as a girl is so different from Shoshanna as a grown-up that Rosie wonders how the one became the other—and if she can change that outcome. Rosie is an appealing, sympathetic character who develops believably in her quest to expand both her life and her music. While the scope of her synesthesia is conveyed in a somewhat confusing way, the descriptions of her sensory perceptions are lyrical and evocative, though at times excessive. The depiction of generational trauma is poignant and subtle, from Rosie’s Holocaust-survivor great-grandparents, to her dying, Alzheimer’s-afflicted grandmother, to her mother. However, as a literary device, Rosie’s unexplained time-travel interactions with Shanna feel awkward and unnecessary.
A quiet exploration of synesthesia, music, and family history. (discussion questions, author’s note) (Fiction. 10-13)Pub Date: March 5, 2024
ISBN: 9781728487779
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Carolrhoda
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
