Choppy and an issue book to the core, though certainly effective on the texting-and-driving message.
Nature, photography, sisterhood, and severe consequences for texting while driving.
Sisters Roo, 16, and Tilly, 14, live right where the Connecticut River meets Long Island Sound. Between Roo’s stunning photographs (of river, beaches, marshes, and people) and her off-the-charts academic test scores, she’s a shoo-in for Yale—until one fateful day. Roo’s late picking up Tilly; Tilly pesters her by text, demanding a response; Roo glances down to reply “5 mins away” and flips her car, ending up paralyzed and in a coma. The sisters alternate first-person narration. Via Roo’s chapters, readers know long before her family and doctors that she’s actually not in a coma—she has locked-in syndrome and can’t move, but she’s fully sentient and as sharp as ever. Themes are plentiful and include guilt and confession; recovery (Roo uses a brain-computer interface to communicate and eventually take photos with her one mobile eye); boyfriends and loyalty; and, of course, the warning about texting while driving. Textual insistences that the sisters are best friends with an unbreakable relationship and that Roo’s the most “special, luminous girl”—both before and after paralysis—are unduly explicit, and Tilly’s voice is sometimes uncharacteristically florid. White characters are white by default, while characters of color are specified, stereotyped, and mainly present to supply support and wisdom.
Choppy and an issue book to the core, though certainly effective on the texting-and-driving message. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-545-83955-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Point/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
A somewhat entertaining, fast-paced journey that fizzles at the end.
A teenager runs away to Seattle, hoping to locate her missing sister.
Fifteen-year-old Eleanor idolizes her older sister, Sam, despite their being complete opposites: Sam is outgoing and wild, while socially awkward Eleanor is known as Little Miss Perfect, always doing the right and safe thing. After Sam runs away from home, the only communication she has with Eleanor are three postcards sent from Seattle. Eleanor decides to trace her 18-year-old sister’s footsteps, leaving her messages and hopping on a bus to find her. But when Sam doesn’t meet her at the bus depot, Eleanor, who has no real plan, has to learn how to survive on her own while searching the city for her sister. While the close bond between the girls is well depicted through flashbacks, the reveal of an important secret ultimately feels anticlimactic. A major plot point relies too heavily on chance and coincidence to be fully believable. While the color scheme, cityscapes, and background illustrations are atmospheric, the manga-inspired drawing style comes across as dated and flat. The depiction of the fabricated stories Eleanor tells is intriguing, as are the themes of friendship, living in the moment, and maintaining hope; unfortunately, none are thematically strong enough to resonate. The emotional impact of Eleanor’s experiences is diluted by her at times humorous narration. Eleanor and the main cast read as White.
A somewhat entertaining, fast-paced journey that fizzles at the end. (Graphic novel. 12-15)Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-50023-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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