A tense page-turner that shows adolescent humanity at its best and worst.
Marooned on a desert island, six high school girls must survive the elements and one another in this debut novel by Castle.
In 1993, 17-year-old Ellery Holmes is a talented heptathlete, starting as a scholarship student at Kings’ Academy, a top English private school. She’ll be meeting some of her new classmates (five girls, two boys) for the first time on a school trip to the Maldives. Ellery is something of a loner—a trait that’s exacerbated by the recent death of her father. She makes a new friend in the brainy, bullied Dawkes, but the rest of the rich, spoiled group offer little hope of acceptance. Petty jealousies and spite, Ellery can handle, but then the group’s plane goes down and they wash up on an uninhabited island. The pilot is dead, the group’s teacher is badly injured, and the two boys swim off alone to a neighboring island. Ellery and Dawkes are left trying to cooperate with alpha mean girl Whitney and her fellow “Cronies.” Further complicating matters is the fact that the remaining member of the group, Skye, is Ellery’s former best friend, whom she hasn’t spoken to since they kissed two years ago. Castle writes from Ellery’s first-person point of view and intersperses occasional diary entries by Dawkes throughout the narrative. The prose is crisp and effective, and the dialogue feels naturalistic. Castle’s story explores what humans are capable of when far from civilization, unambiguously following in the footsteps of William Golding’s classic novel Lord of the Flies1954), which it name checks. The main difference is that Castle’s castaways are mostly female. The stage is thus set for an exploration of the teenage group’s strengths (levelheadedness, adaptable intelligence, a willingness to cooperate) and weaknesses (posturing and a toxic adherence to social hierarchies). One can argue that the negative characteristics are attached too tightly to the Cronies, which makes them rather grueling characters; it also lessens the impact of their descent into evil. Nonetheless, the other players’ plights demand resolution and will keep readers on tenterhooks.
A tense page-turner that shows adolescent humanity at its best and worst.Pub Date: Dec. 19, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-916903-13-5
Page Count: 374
Publisher: Dark Horse Publishing LLP
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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