A very relevant love story with strong crossover possibilities for teen readers.
In Boston, an idealistic schoolteacher gets her artist boyfriend a job with her father’s video game company even as she's losing a promising student to the addiction of gaming.
Goodman’s (The Cookbook Collector, 2010, etc.) eighth novel takes place in two skillfully evoked worlds that are at war for the hearts and minds of young people: video games versus education, specifically high school English classes. Nina is the only child of the rich and powerful man behind Arkadia, a virtual-reality game company. Just out of college, she has taken a position with TeacherCorps and is now somewhat desperately attempting to communicate the joys of Emerson and Shakespeare to the ethnically diverse but universally bored students of Emerson High. Collin, the “chalk artist” of the title, is a 23-year-old dropout who works in a bar and can draw like an angel. Soon after the two fall in love, he finds himself designing horses on a high-tech tablet at the Arkadia image factory. Twins Aidan and Diana are Nina’s students, but Aidan is not doing his homework. He is deeply lost in the world of “EverWhen,” where his avatar meets and falls in love with a sexy Tree Elf named Riyah who says she can get him a pre-release of “Underworld,” Arkadia’s hotly awaited next game, if he will perform a real-world promotional task that crosses the line into criminality. The language and details of the games—sparkling aeroflakes, epic qwests, diamond flasks “filled with a hatchling dragon’s blood”—are the strongest and most original elements of the book: in fact, nongaming readers may be surprised to find themselves wondering if they are missing out on something. On the other hand, some of the plot developments relating to Aidan feel forced, and his twin almost seems to be living in a different novel with her weight problems and sexuality issues.
A very relevant love story with strong crossover possibilities for teen readers.Pub Date: June 13, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6987-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dial Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: he’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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