Very entertaining, with an irrepressible, cheerworthy heroine.
A red-haired girl has three weeks to prove that kids in wheelchairs can gain acceptance, popularity, and maybe fame in this middle-grade novel.
Bluebell Skinks is as bold as her frizzy red hair, and she’s fearless while practicing spins “in a purple wheelchair…the latest model.” She and her sister, Bonnie (blonde, calm, and tidy), have always been privately tutored; their wealthy dad worries about mean children. Spending summers with Mr. Skinks, Bonnie, and Grandmother Skinks, Bluebell is due to return to Europe, where she lives with her mother, but that’s delayed this year. Meanwhile, Mr. Skinks and Bonnie go out of town, leaving Bluebell with her busy grandmother—the perfect opportunity to secretly attend Mortimer Potts Elementary School. Her plan? She’ll “become the most popular kid in the history of the school, maybe even famous!” Bluebell impersonates her grandmother on the phone and arranges a good reception at the school, not least because the principal would love a job with Skinks Industries. Bluebell makes friends and gains admirers with one exploit after another while outwitting Hoops Russell, the school’s best basketball player, who becomes determined to discredit her. By the end, everyone sees disability differently. Cooper (Granny’s Teeth, 2017) keeps things bouncing along with improbable but amusing events, like a science teacher’s experiment gone awry. At the same time, a strong dose of realism makes Bluebell’s progress more believable; for example, she campaigns for student government not through impossible promises but by thinking through, and getting buy-in for, workable compromises. Though broad, humor can be pointed: Bluebell’s well-meaning teacher is quoted as saying, “We should remember that disabled people are just like us, almost.” If Bluebell seems a little too self-confident and mature to be a realistic role model, there’s also an adult wheelchair basketball team whose members’ athleticism even Hoops admires—and a twist ending that puts things in perspective. The pencil comic book–style illustrations are animated and nicely composed.
Very entertaining, with an irrepressible, cheerworthy heroine.Pub Date: Jan. 21, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4808-7245-5
Page Count: 123
Publisher: Archway Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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