A compulsively readable account of a young teen’s journey toward hope.
The cadence and imagery of poetry illuminate a journey through grief and fear to healing and self-discovery.
In her second verse novel, Fritz uses narrative free verse and the imagery of oceans and lighthouses in rhythmic poetry to tell the story of Claire Sloan, a 13-year-old who navigates an awakening sense of self along with the shock of witnessing her mother suffer a serious medical event. The poems, told in Claire’s first-person narration, are divided into three parts that build on one another like successive waves. In “Low Tide,” readers learn about Claire’s family’s summer vacation in Maine and the sudden onset of her mom’s ruptured brain aneurysm. Claire brings readers with her through her mom’s time in the hospital and her fears about what it might mean if she doesn’t survive. In “Midtide,” poems narrate Claire’s return home to Pennsylvania, where she enters eighth grade, swims in the churning waters of young adolescence, and explores her grief. In “High Tide,” Claire’s mom returns home from rehab; the poems evoke the entire family’s healing journey, including Claire’s discovery of how to best express her own burgeoning hope and understanding. The author’s note describes Fritz’s personal experiences with two brain aneurysm ruptures. The strong pace and interesting subject matter make this work broadly compelling and accessible. The Sloans are white; Claire has good friends who are Black and Latine.
A compulsively readable account of a young teen’s journey toward hope. (Verse fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9780823452330
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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
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