Life dishes up the sweet with the sour following the disappearance of a child's parents in this perceptive, barbed tale from the author of The Trolls (1999). Horvath displays a real knack for naming. Everyone else in her small British Columbian fishing town is sure that her mother and father are lost at sea, but 11-year-old Primrose Squarp clings to hope as months pass. She too is passed: from the minimal care of gruff old Miss Perfidy, to a previously unknown uncle who turns out to be an enterprising real-estate developer, and then, thanks to a small-minded school counselor, to out-of-town foster parents. Along the way, she loses a pair of minor body parts in accidents, but gains loyal friends both in Uncle Jack and in Kate Bowzer, proprietor of a café called The Girl on the Red Swing, in which everything, including salad, is served on a waffle. Food not only plays a recurrent theme here, but each chapter ends with a recipe (of varying palatability). The author engages in some clever role reversal with Uncle Jack, a happy-go-lucky sort with a streak of fierce loyalty who is unperturbed when his housing development goes up in flames, but fights tooth and nail to regain custody of Primrose. He never once expresses doubt that her parents are alive—as indeed they turn out to be. Primrose is a serious, sturdy soul, able to hold her own against this quirky, nearly all-adult supporting cast, and by the time her shipwrecked mother and father are rescued, she has gained considerable insight into human nature—as well as the ability to create dishes as diverse as Cherry Pie Pork Chops and Butterscotch Chow Mein Noodle Cookies. And waffles, of course. That she was right all along about her parents will make her story extra sweet to readers. (Fiction. 11-15)
Pub Date: April 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-32236-8
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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An intimate novel that beautifully confronts grief and loss.
It’s 1983, and 13-year-old Indian American Reha feels caught between two worlds.
Monday through Friday, she goes to a school where she stands out for not being White but where she has a weekday best friend, Rachel, and does English projects with potential crush Pete. On the weekends, she’s with her other best friend, Sunita (Sunny for short), at gatherings hosted by her Indian community. Reha feels frustrated that her parents refuse to acknowledge her Americanness and insist on raising her with Indian values and habits. Then, on the night of the middle school dance, her mother is admitted to the hospital, and Reha’s world is split in two again: this time, between hospital and home. Suddenly she must learn not just how to be both Indian and American, but also how to live with her mother’s leukemia diagnosis. The sections dealing with Reha’s immigrant identity rely on oft-told themes about the overprotectiveness of immigrant parents and lack the nuance found in later pages. Reha’s story of her evolving relationships with her parents, however, feels layered and real, and the scenes in which Reha must grapple with the possible loss of a parent are beautifully and sensitively rendered. The sophistication of the text makes it a valuable and thought-provoking read even for those older than the protagonist.
An intimate novel that beautifully confronts grief and loss. (Verse novel. 11-15)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-304742-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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