A long and winding road to a botched surprise: Look elsewhere for satisfaction.
A girlfriend, a gay best friend, and an imaginary companion provide company and distraction for a teenager experiencing repressed trauma.
Beginning with the book’s title and the appearance of a dapper, spectral gent named Winston Ono on the first page, Goldblatt makes good on his claim at the outset that John, Paul, George, and Ringo are all over this exercise in misdirection. Not that the many embedded Fab Four riffs add anything significant beyond opportunities for readers to feel clever for spotting them. His mom may be just a voice on the phone and his dad an emotional wreck, but David Salmon keeps up a semblance of normalcy as he drifts between home and his Flushing, Queens, middle school—hanging out with secretive BFF Hector Caban, struggling to keep pace with aggressive and easily offended classmate Minnie Drugas, and getting used to having Winston suddenly pop up in his bedroom or out on the street to deliver vague, evasive comments. As it eventually turns out, there has been a tragic family event…but since the author studiously avoids having anyone mention it and provides only deliberately misleading hints, when David does at last reveal its nature with a sudden meltdown, it seems to come out of nowhere. An assurance thereafter that now it’s going to be “getting so much better” has, at best, a tinny ring. The main cast presents White.
A long and winding road to a botched surprise: Look elsewhere for satisfaction. (Fantasy. 12-15)Pub Date: May 5, 2023
ISBN: 9781949515510
Page Count: 214
Publisher: Phoenix Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023
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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