It’s not enough that brilliant and beautiful Allegra “Legs” Hanover is infatuated with handsome, elusive, and seemingly unattainable oddball classmate and surfer Andros Bliss, but her long-time admirer and would-be boyfriend, nerdy Derman Bloom, has just slept with Legs’s best friend, Angie. Or has he? No one is really sure, and Time Zone High’s legendary Rules of Virginity aren’t much help. Slightly worse than her unrequited love and this recent betrayal is pending global calamity: A huge asteroid is hurtling toward Earth, expected to hit and destroy the world within hours. Legs wants to make the best of whatever time she has left, but Andros, enigmatic as ever and a surfer to the bone, is more interested in the last big wave the collision will cause. Strasser (who last visited this setting in Girl Gives Birth to Own Prom Date, 1996, etc.) has taken a serious notion—how to function in the face of disaster—and fashioned a riotously funny tale. In the face of recent end-of-the-world films, this novel looks almost masterful, with some weird and wonderful characters, side-splitting dialogue, suspense, and way more attitude than any old asteroid can diminish. (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-689-81113-6
Page Count: 169
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
A legend in her own mind, former New Yorker Mary Elizabeth (“My true name is Lola”) Cep sweeps into her new suburban New Jersey high school and runs smack into a stone wall named Carla Santini: class queen, beautiful, clever, and vicious. In a series of sharp skirmishes, both teenagers display generous quantities of grit and ego, and though Lola beats out Carla for the lead in the school play, she also, thanks to a positive penchant for embellishing the truth, maneuvers herself into a reckless nighttime junket into Manhattan with her mousy friend, Ella. Hours later, the two find their wildest dreams coming true as they accompany a popular, very drunk rock star to a hot post-concert party. Sheldon (Boy Of My Dreams, 1997) gives her fast-talking protagonist a winning supporting cast (led by Ella, who turns out to be unexpectedly levelheaded and loyal in the crunch), a worthy rival and triumphs that are not easily won; readers will cheer the high spots, groan at the low, and applaud Lola in general for her grandly disarming style. (Fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7636-0822-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
A veteran high-school teacher cracks, holding his class at gunpoint on the last day of school in this drama-in-poetry from Glenn (Who Killed Mr. Chippendale?, 1996, etc.). Writing in conversational free-verse trains of thought, Glenn probes the hopes, fears, conceits, and moods of students, officials, and bystanders, introducing each of the hostages with a series of vignettes that trace the evolution of a particular idea or relationship through four years of school and to the beginning of class that fateful day. Fond of playing with language and irony—e.g., pairing poems in which the speakers express opposite views in nearly the same words—the author keeps the focus so firmly on individuals that the plot is really only a pretext for a series of earnest character portraits. From Morton Potter's determined assault on his weight problem to Denise Slattery cooing to her unborn child, readers will find plenty of familiar peer attitudes and situations with which to identify and to ponder. The teacher's own voice is heard in a handful of despondent poems: ``I speak./Who listens?/I teach./Who cares? . . . There's little I have done to make a difference.'' After the teacher's capture, police find a clipping in his pocket describing his 27-year-old son's apparent suicide by drowning. An arresting, if undeveloped, premise cements a gallery of recognizable high-school seniors fretting about—or blowing off—their pasts and futures. (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-525-67548-5
Page Count: 183
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1997
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