A clumsy combo, with exciting premise weighed down by passive destiny, stale stereotypes, and ugly tropes
A tech whiz is prophesied to save modern London from the combined forces of corrupt government and magical Chaos.
Sixteen-year-old Lily is Veronica Mars meets Shadowhunters’ Clary Fray, a hacker dragged into the magical underworld. Lily's attacked by a two-headed dog while seeking a man she believes is a mundane forger and is rescued from the brink of death by heavily tattooed and "eerily beautiful" Regan Lupescar. As Regan alternately pushes Lily away and drags her further into his Eldritche secrets, he reveals his hard-core fighting abilities: ripping a banshee's heart out of her chest, punching through a van, and beheading an attacker with a single blow. What Regan completely lacks, however, is any understanding of technology, and that's where Lily comes in. Her technobabble-inspiring skills ("They said it was impossible that a sixteen-year-old girl was using hexadecimal characters like that") reveal the sinister conspiracy of governmental forces and big pharma at the heart of the building apocalypse. Luckily Regan and Lily are destined to save the world through Lily's incredibly rare Type H blood, though Lily suspects something darker about the prophecy, something making Regan even more attractively standoffish. The refreshing interaction of programmer girl meets magical boy is marred by constant, appalling racial stereotypes of secondary characters. A turbaned Sikh has a hooked nose; a West Indian street cleaner speaks in embarrassing dialect; a Japanese spirit longs for geishas.
A clumsy combo, with exciting premise weighed down by passive destiny, stale stereotypes, and ugly tropes . (Fantasy. 12-15)Pub Date: Oct. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-545-82958-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Chicken House/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel,...
Adventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.
Elisa—Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle—has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone—and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra—can save them. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202648-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
Characters to love, quips to snort at, insights to ponder: typical Spinelli.
For two teenagers, a small town’s annual cautionary ritual becomes both a life- and a death-changing experience.
On the second Wednesday in June, every eighth grader in Amber Springs, Pennsylvania, gets a black shirt, the name and picture of a teen killed the previous year through reckless behavior—and the silent treatment from everyone in town. Like many of his classmates, shy, self-conscious Robbie “Worm” Tarnauer has been looking forward to Dead Wed as a day for cutting loose rather than sober reflection…until he finds himself talking to a strange girl or, as she would have it, “spectral maiden,” only he can see or touch. Becca Finch is as surprised and confused as Worm, only remembering losing control of her car on an icy slope that past Christmas Eve. But being (or having been, anyway) a more outgoing sort, she sees their encounter as a sign that she’s got a mission. What follows, in a long conversational ramble through town and beyond, is a day at once ordinary yet rich in discovery and self-discovery—not just for Worm, but for Becca too, with a climactic twist that leaves both ready, or readier, for whatever may come next. Spinelli shines at setting a tongue-in-cheek tone for a tale with serious underpinnings, and as in Stargirl (2000), readers will be swept into the relationship that develops between this adolescent odd couple. Characters follow a White default.
Characters to love, quips to snort at, insights to ponder: typical Spinelli. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-30667-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2021
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