Inspiring and hopeful; young love and the call to action resonate.
Romance blooms against a backdrop of adversity and environmental conservation efforts.
It’s 2018, and Soleida, a 16-year-old Cuban girl, lives with her artist parents, who create sculptures protesting government laws that criminalize some forms of artistic expression. When a climate change–fueled hurricane destroys their home and exposes the art in their garden to authorities, her parents are arrested, and Soleida must flee, seeking asylum. Cuban American Dariel, also 16, has traveled to Costa Rica with his Abuelo to help him write the story of los caminantes, Cuban migrants fleeing oppression who have been stranded at the border with Nicaragua, unable to continue their journeys. Dariel comes from a wealthy celebrity family in California and has been affected by climate change in the form of dangerous wildfires that destroyed his home. When the two teens first meet in a refugee camp in the Costa Rican jungle, Soleida is traumatized by her journey, and Dariel is unable to connect with her. But slowly they begin a relationship centered on a mutual reverence for nature and a proclivity for the arts—Soleida is a painter, and Dariel is a musician. Chapters with alternating perspectives move the story forward briskly. Luscious verse and beautiful descriptions of the flora and fauna bring attention to the impacts of the climate crisis and the urgent need for change.
Inspiring and hopeful; young love and the call to action resonate. (author’s note) (Verse novel. 12-17)Pub Date: April 18, 2023
ISBN: 9781665926362
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
A memorable / and innovative story / of one wrenching year.
Seventeen-year-old Ashe Douglas records the events of 1968 in a novel in haiku.
Ashe was born on May 17, 1951, and is a senior in high school during the year he decides to describe in haiku, liking the tidiness of the three-line, 17-syllable form. The year is 1968, when more soldiers died in the Vietnam War than in any other year. Ashe decides not only to write haiku, but to dedicate a syllable to each soldier killed—976 haiku equals 16,592 syllables equals the number of soldiers killed in 1968. An entire story “contained by a syllable count.” Not only is that asking a lot of its diminutive form, but so much happened in 1968: the war, race riots, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, let alone Ashe’s family life, which resembles a war zone. Haiku stanzas just can’t contain it all, being ill equipped for the depth or context necessary for a rich historical novel. But what transcends contrivance and gimmickry is Ashe’s voice, and haiku are well-suited to carry that. With newspaper headlines, death tolls, and overwhelming world, national and domestic events in the background, one boy’s clear and earnest voice records his life: “I’ll / write what needs to be / remembered and leave it to / you to fill in the gaps.”
A memorable / and innovative story / of one wrenching year. (historical note, author’s note) (Historical fiction/poetry. 12-16)Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-30215-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A dynamic story of grief, loyalty, and, finally, some cheerworthy victories.
With her father dead, her friends being yanked away, and fatphobia battering her, a teen finds affection and strength with a boy she meets online.
Fifteen-year-old Shay lost Dad a year ago, and she’s not close to her stepmother, who seems only to wish that Shay were thinner. At school, nemesis Kelly leaves oinking stuffed pigs on her chair and changes Shay’s cell ringtone to pig sounds. Best friends Dash and Boots are being stolen: Boots by brain cancer, which is killing her, and Dash by his father, who sends him to military school for being gay. Shay connects with a boy online (screen name “Godotwait4me”)—until their growing closeness infuriates Kelly so much she launches a website she calls Get the Pig Back in Its Pen, dedicated to breaking them up. StVil’s verse prose is inventive and alive, sometimes cryptic, sometimes lurching, sometimes stunning; it rhymes only rarely yet with the effect of a gut punch (“Car. Speed. Head. / Docs. Tried. Dad. Dead”). Food-based figures of speech are gorgeous; unfortunately, they underscore the stereotype of Shay as a fat comfort-eater, but refreshingly, the plot has no weight-loss arc. Shay and Godot’s text threads hum with mutual attraction, high wit, and each one’s self-defeating fragilities. Shay’s race is undesignated, although she looks white on the cover.
A dynamic story of grief, loyalty, and, finally, some cheerworthy victories. (Verse fiction. 13-16)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-544-70674-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2016
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