Another teenager-with-a-dead-parent-gets-their-heart-broken tale.
The grief of losing a parent to cancer and the grief of a breakup—they may not be on the same scale, but for Maya, they feel connected.
After her boyfriend, Whit, breaks up with her the summer before she starts college, Maya goes through her dead mother’s scientific research papers and finds an experiment on romantic attraction. She decides to carry on the research herself, with help from her mother’s former assistant. After all, if she can get Whit to remember what it felt like when everything was good between them, he’d want her back, right? In need of more test subjects, she plays with the hearts and minds of two other friends, Kyle and Asher, with little consideration for their feelings. Also given little consideration? Her decision to ingest the serum made from her subjects’ DNA samples and other materials stolen from the lab. She keeps her two closest friends, Yael and Bryan, who are both gay, ignorant of her experiment in this science-y twist on the age-old tale of a broken heart. Some fun, quirky details give the story and its characters a boost, but in general, there is little to distinguish this novel from the rest of the teenage breakup genre. The characters are entertaining yet predictable, the action is well-paced but predictable, the premise is mildly interesting yet....The book assumes a white default.
Another teenager-with-a-dead-parent-gets-their-heart-broken tale. (Fiction. 13-15)Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-328-76464-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
There’s some originality here, though it’s hard to unearth amid all the melodrama
An illegitimate girl who hopes to find her creative passion may be connected to another kingdom’s magical history.
At 10, white, orphaned Brienna was brought to Magnalia House. For the last seven years she’s studied to become an arden, an apprentice passion, with the goal of finding her patron. The arden-sisters study art, dramatics, music, wit, and knowledge; Brienna, who has no true vocation, has eccentrically studied in all the fields. Though she doesn’t truly belong among the talented (and somewhat racially diverse) noble girls of Magnalia House, they are her beloved friends. Perhaps once she’s passioned, she can even act on her romantic feelings for the white knowledge master. But Brienna’s having strange visions lately; could they be ancestral memories of an unknown forbear from the neighboring country? What with romance, jealousy, family drama, betrayals, ancient magical history, and characters with multiple secret identities, there’s a nigh-constant pitch of throbbing…well, passion. A voice is like “tamed thunder,” and hair is like “a stream of silver.” Malapropisms abound (“punctures of laughter”; “her beauty warbled by the mullioned windows”). Oddly, most of the shocking revelations of back story are openly detailed in the lengthy family trees at the novel’s opening.
There’s some originality here, though it’s hard to unearth amid all the melodrama . (Fantasy. 13-15)Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-247134-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: HarperTeen
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
Nasty Prince Henry of the Seelie Court has come to Avalon, the city caught between the human realm and Faerie, to invite...
At last, Dana meets a Fae boy who doesn't want to sleep with her in this third in the Faeriewalker series, which began with Glimmerglass (2010).
Nasty Prince Henry of the Seelie Court has come to Avalon, the city caught between the human realm and Faerie, to invite half-human Dana to be formally presented at Court. Dana and her father are sure there's a deeper game at play—don't both Fae queens want Dana dead because of her dangerous Faeriewalker powers?—but she has no choice but to obey the summons. The journey from the incongruously modern Avalon (why do Faeries celebrate Christmas?) to the Seelie Court is chock-full of all the necessary adventures, from monster attacks to opportunities for heroic self-sacrifice. Dana finally exercises both her magical powers and her intelligence in order to help herself and her friends. And of course, there's plenty of opportunity for chest thumping among her various suitors. Dana's youthful narrative style can be disconcertingly at odds with the steaminess she describes ("I was smushed up against him… [and] painfully aware that he, uh, enjoyed having me there"); this realistic teen heroine has an occasionally bumpy meeting with romance conventions. But Dana's grim-but-hopeful interactions with her alcoholic mother ground this urban fantasy in a welcome verisimilitude.Pub Date: July 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-57595-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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