PLB 0-679-99300-2 In a story that sprawls over the thematic landscape, two teenagers are shaken by sudden family losses and menaced by a pair of genuinely scary hoodlums as they fumble their way toward intimacy. Despite all hints, Amos is surprised when his father dies of stomach cancer; meanwhile, his classmate Clara watches as her parents separate and her mother takes a teaching job overseas. Enter bad-news siblings Charles and Eddie Tripp; when Amos witnesses them vandalizing mailboxes, Charles lays him out with a baseball bat, then mounts a clever campaign of terror to ensure his silence. Coached by his sinister older brother, Eddie begins stalking Clara, with intentions that seem simultaneously leering and romantic. Other than one friend, Bruce, whose presence is an obvious attempt at comic relief, Amos and Clara are otherwise surrounded by oblivious, ineffectual, or malicious peers and adults. Although a series of missteps gives their budding romance an engaging coltishness, there is so much anger, fear, and grief here, as well as brutality and betrayal, that the story can be deadening. Switching point-of-view from Amos to Clara in alternating chapters, the McNeals (The Dog Who Lost His Bob, 1996) drive their cast to a contrived but terrifying attempted rape, then end on a sour note, with a flat Thanksgiving and the news that Charles is back in juvie—-but only for a few months. (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-89300-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
An eighth grader discovers five schoolmates with psychic powers in this amateurish effort from Lubar. Martin, who was expelled from every other junior high in six counties for mouthing off, is consigned to prison-like Edgeview Alternative School, along with other violent or nerdy teens deemed hopeless misfits. While trying to avoid both the ready fists of hulking bully Lester Bloodbath and the shock therapy meted out by Principal Davis, he meets Torchy, who can start fires without matches or lighters, Cheater Woo, whose test answers are always identical to someone else’s, and several others with odd, unconscious talents. Interspersing Martin’s tediously self-analytical narrative with flat attempts at humor, trite student essays, repetitive memos to faculty, and mawkish letters from home, Lugar draws the tale to a paradoxical climax in which the self-styled “psi five” scuttle Bloodbath’s plot to close the school down, but then do their best to earn releases. After realizing that he is psychic, able to read people’s deepest fears and hopes, Martin abruptly acquires a sense of responsibility and resolves never to abuse his talent. Padded with aimless subplots and earnest efforts to drum up sympathy for the one-dimensional cast’s brutal bullies and ineffectual teachers, this contrived story is a weak alternative to Stephanie Tolan’s Welcome to the Ark (1996) or Willo Davis Roberts’s The Girl with the Silver Eyes (1980). (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-86646-1
Page Count: 213
Publisher: Tor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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