An empowering new voice transforms kif-kif—same old, same old—into kiffer, something to be crazy about.
Guène’s smart, upbeat debut shows a North African teenager finding the inner grit to withstand pervasive racism in a hardscrabble Parisian suburb.
Fifteen-year-old Doria lives with her illiterate mother in a crummy, rundown housing project. They have been at the mercy of nosy social workers since Doria’s father left them to return to Morocco six months before. The Beard, as she calls him, wanted a son (“for his pride, his reputation, the family honor, and I’m sure lots of other stupid reasons”), and her mother couldn’t have any more children. At the moment, his abandoned family’s mektoub (destiny) seems to consist of getting along on welfare and secondhand clothing. Doria barely scrapes by at school, where apathetic teachers dish out unengaging work. Mom cleans rooms at the dreary Formula 1 Motel, answering to the generic ethnic name of Fatma even though her real name is Yasmina. Doria can only talk to two people: Mme Burlaud, the school-mandated psychologist she sees every Monday, and Hamoudi, an out-of-work young man who smokes spliff and deals drugs but has a caring, protective way with the girl. She and her mother also occasionally visit an Algerian friend they call Aunt Zohra—a “real woman,” according to Doria, because she is “strong” and can even deal with her husband spending six months each year back in the old country with a second wife. Despite her gloomy prospects, Doria refuses to be bitter and even finds some redeeming qualities in “lame-o” Nabil, who comes over to help with her civics homework. Slowly, things begin to change: Her mother leaves the motel after a strike and begins taking classes in English; Hamoudi falls in love with a single-mom tenant. And as for Doria, her luck might be lousy, but she’s determined that her fate won’t be.
An empowering new voice transforms kif-kif—same old, same old—into kiffer, something to be crazy about.Pub Date: July 3, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-603048-9
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harvest/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
A celebratory song of the sea.
A shrimpy 13-year-old with a super-sized passion for marine life comes of age during a summer of discovery on the tidal flats of Puget Sound.
Miles O’Malley—Squid Boy to his friends—doesn’t mind being short. It’s other things that keep him awake at night, like his parents’ talk of divorce and his increasingly lustful thoughts about the girl next door. Mostly, though, it’s the ocean’s siren call that steals his sleep. During one of his moonlit kayak excursions, Miles comes across the rarest sighting ever documented in the northern Pacific: the last gasp of a Giant Squid. Scientists are stunned. The media descend. As Miles continues to stumble across other oddball findings, including two invasive species that threaten the eco-balance of Puget Sound, a nearby new-age cult’s interest in Miles prompts a headline in USA Today: Kid Messiah? Soon tourists are flocking to the tidal flats, crushing crustaceans underfoot and painting their bodies with black mud. Dodging disingenuous journalists, deluded disciples and the death-throes of his parents’ marriage, Miles tries to recapture some semblance of normality. He reads up on the G-spot and the Kama Sutra to keep pace with his pals’ bull sessions about sex (hilariously contributing “advanced” details that gross the other boys out). But Miles’s aquatic observations cannot be undone, and as summer draws to a close, inhabitants of Puget Sound prepare for a national blitzkrieg of media and scientific attention and the highest tide in 40 years, all of which threatens everything Miles holds dear. On land, the rickety plot could have used some shoring up. Miles is just too resourceful for the reader to believe his happiness—or that of those he loves—is ever at stake. But when Miles is on the water, Lynch’s first novel becomes a stunning light show, both literal, during phosphorescent plankton blooms, and metaphorical, in the poetic fireworks Lynch’s prose sets off as he describes his clearly beloved Puget Sound.
A celebratory song of the sea.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-605-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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