A scathing work and an essential blueprint for youth battling climate change.
Young teens face climate change head-on in Aronson’s middle-grade novel.
In 2030, when a Category 4 hurricane hits Maine, 13-year-old Mandalay Hawk is home alone; her father, Tom, is away, and the roads are closed. Water and wind batter the house, and Mandalay barely survives a roof collapse. Afterward, she’s fed up with adult complacency about extreme weather; to grab attention, she breaks into her high school, Nagatoon Regional, and steals 50 electronic “dweebs”—tabletlike devices donated by energy company Star Power—and sets them on fire in the parking lot. In lipstick, she writes on a chalkboard, “If we don’t stop global warming now, it will be too late. It will make the pandemic of 2020 look like a picnic in the park!!!” The action gets Mandalay expelled and placed in front of Judge Mary Baxter, who fines her $50,000 and sentences her to a year’s probation. She and Tom move to Manhattan’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, where she befriends classmates Jazmin and Gute, the latter a dedicated reader who shuns personal electronic devices. As the trio grows closer, Mandalay reveals her past, and the teens start missing school to tour the city, which, in this era, is ravaged by floods. When their history teacher, Mr. Harkness, learns that the students are researching climate change and the United States’ past response to crises during their outings, he allows them to continue their jaunts. Eventually, Mandalay decides to hold an event at City Hall, and with her friends’ help, she starts KRAAP (Kids Revolt Against Adult Power) but remains unsure about the future.
Aronson’s impassioned novel could serve as a primer for a generation that sees climate change’s effects up-close in the coming years. The world he envisions is surreal, frightening, and, unfortunately, visible on our horizon today. His Manhattan, for example, is so hot that it can support palm trees, and it has canals to divert the rising Atlantic Ocean; fire has claimed the animals of the Bronx Zoo, and lower Broadway has “two feet of smelly, yucky, greenish water and no people.” Other problems include tent cities of climate refugees from uninhabitable states, such as Florida, and constantly hazy skies filled with wildfire toxins. People also carry “stink towels” because they never stop sweating. The book states its themes bluntly, as when Jazmin says, “As a species, we’re pathetic....We just let this happen. To satisfy the materialism of our civilization, more and more fossil fuel is still being burned.” Still, Aronson tries to insert humor in scenes involving the twin principals, Homer and Hubert Bushwick, who try to rein in Mandalay’s behavior. The narrative’s final third introduces some far-fetched elements involving U.S. President William “Bucky” Billingham, but they’re less important than the informative exposition for young readers: “Anthropocene is a term used to describe the current scientific—or geological—period in time...in which humans have impacted earth and climate in a negative way.” The finale is pure wish fulfillment, but anything less would be criminal.
A scathing work and an essential blueprint for youth battling climate change.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-7320775-3-9
Page Count: 238
Publisher: Double M Books Inc.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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