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
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
Soapy, suspenseful fun.
A remembered horror plunges a pregnant woman into a waking nightmare.
Tegan Werner, 23, barely recalls her one-night stand with married real estate developer Simon Lamar; she only learns Simon’s name after seeing him on the local news five months later. Simon wants nothing to do with the resulting child Tegan now carries and tells his lawyer to negotiate a nondisclosure agreement. A destitute Tegan is all too happy to trade her silence for cash—until a whiff of Simon’s cologne triggers a memory of him drugging and raping her. Distraught and eight months pregnant, Tegan flees her Lewiston, Maine, apartment and drives north in a blizzard, intending to seek comfort and counsel from her older brother, Dennis; instead, she gets lost and crashes, badly injuring her ankle. Tegan is terrified when hulking stranger Hank Thompson stops and extricates her from the wreck, and becomes even more so when he takes her to his cabin rather than the hospital, citing hazardous road conditions. Her anxiety eases somewhat upon meeting Hank’s wife, Polly—a former nurse who settles Tegan in a basement hospital room originally built for Polly’s now-deceased mother. Polly vows to call 911 as soon as the phones and power return, but when that doesn’t happen, Tegan becomes convinced that Hank is forcing Polly to hold her prisoner. Tegan doesn’t know the half of it. McFadden unspools her twisty tale via a first-person-present narration that alternates between Tegan and Polly, grounding character while elevating tension. Coincidence and frustratingly foolish assumptions fuel the plot, but readers able to suspend disbelief are in for a wild ride. A purposefully ambiguous, forward-flashing prologue hints at future homicide, establishing stakes from the jump.
Soapy, suspenseful fun.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781464227325
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Poisoned Pen
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
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