Earnest and uplifting.
Two queer girls go on a journey of love and self-discovery after learning a beloved manga series has gone out of print.
Neesha Sparks is a Black, introverted lesbian who has recently moved with her mother from Queens to North Carolina. On her first day at Durham Western High, she meets fellow new kid—chatty Boricua Gabrielle Graciana, who’s bisexual. Neesha and Gabby are in the same classes after their principal transferred Neesha out of her original honors classes on the erroneous assumption that her cerebral palsy limited her intellectual ability; he soon moves her back into honors classes, and the two girls become inseparable. The unlikely duo find common ground in their love of a manga series called Super Navigator Nozomi, which is about a steampunk spaceship’s engineer and her feelings for the ship’s pilot. Neither have finished the series, so they create a book club of two, but when Neesha discovers that her collection was sold by her father, they embark on a scavenger hunt for the now-out-of-print volumes. As they travel all over the state, the novel, sprinkled with snippets from Navigator Nozomi’s adventures, becomes less about the manga and more about their developing friendship. Both girls have personal struggles from their pasts that could complicate their budding romance. After Neesha's last girlfriend tanked her self-confidence, she hid her disability, history of activism, and love of cosplay. Meanwhile, Gabby is still reeling from her mother’s sudden death a year ago. Despite these serious themes, the novel is sweet and heartfelt with a wholesome romance at its center. The character development is satisfying to watch, especially when paired with Ribeiro’s illustrations, which capture a wide array of emotions in scenes ranging from love confessions to tense arguments. Whitley’s dialogue handles the various issues (orientation, ableism, racism, PTSD, abusive relationships, death) with great care.
Earnest and uplifting.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781952303609
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Maverick
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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
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