A well-told comic tale with a feminist theme.
In this debut children’s chapter book, a girl who dreams of being the first astronaut on Mars gets help for her science fair project from a robot.
Although young Mia Marcotte loves to imagine exploring space, she doesn’t enjoy her science class, where her experiments often go wrong. She doesn’t feel inspired by the third grade science fair until she learns that the best projects “will go on a special field trip…to the space center!” It’s a field trip that the would-be astronaut doesn’t want to miss, so she tries to think of a good project in the three days she has left. Her first attempt doesn’t go well, and Mia’s “architect dad and accountant mom” may not be much help. But maybe her Aunt Serena will; she’s coming for a visit, and she’s an engineer. Serena’s boxes arrive first—and from one of them, a boy-sized intelligent robot emerges, calling himself Aizek. With his help, Mia builds a telescope modeled on Galileo’s. At the science fair, the project has some hitches, but Mia’s inspired by a teenage girl who’s a trainee astronaut. Wondering how such a young girl succeeded, Mia realizes “the simple answer. That girl persisted!” Mia, too, persists, fixing her telescope and achieving her goal. In her debut, Wald tells an amusing story with a series of comic predicaments and a wry narrative voice, as when Mia’s “forehead wrinkled as she tried to find a solution. But the more she tried, the messier her head became.” Aizek’s name appears to be a joking reference to author Isaac Asimov and his famous Three Laws of Robotics. But the story also offers serious messages about not giving up and the collective nature of success; Mia’s parrot and next-door neighbor contribute to her project, for example, and Mia helps Aizek develop imagination. Debut illustrator Caliskan’s black-and-white images are simple but varied and expressive, and depict diverse characters.
A well-told comic tale with a feminist theme.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-2-9568573-1-0
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Sept. 11, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
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