A thoroughly enjoyable mystery with a wonderfully engaging protagonist.
Teenage detective Izzy Brown and her sidekick Elton Jones-Davies are back, investigating a cold-case murder in small-town North Carolina.
It’s 2009, and 16-year-old Izzy, her mother, and her brother have moved yet again—this time from Florida to Ashes in the Pines, a touristy locale in the North Carolina mountains. There, Izzy’s twin sibling, Axl, can take advantage of a prep school football scholarship. “The truth was,” narrates snarky Izzy, “we’d just moved our poverty north a few hundred miles to a milder climate.” Izzy gets a kitchen job at Fuller Farms, a summer camp catering to the very rich. Soon, her best friend unexpectedly shows up: Elton, a brilliant teen with autism. Back in 1992, Vance Fuller, the scion of the wealthy Fuller family, was killed—shot full of arrows. His father, Wellington, knows Izzy’s amazing reputation for crime-solving, so he hires her to find his son’s killer; he’s even arranged for Elton to join her. Specifically, he wants them to confirm that archery instructor Buster McClellan was the murderer. It turns out that there’s a plethora of other colorful suspects. Readers learn over time that Fuller Farms, a redoubt of Christian values, may not be what it appears to be. Izzy, as a character, is a wonderfully conflicted creation and not a Nancy Drew clone. For one thing, she has an opioid problem, facilitated by her mother’s shady boyfriend, Lenny Roach, and she’s constantly fighting to keep it under control. Suspects spring up like weeds after a rain, including three campers with whom Vance was entrusted before his death. The plot is truly dizzying; every time Izzy thinks she’s found the culprit, another pops up in their place. The real killer is found, of course, in a nail-biting conclusion. Gibbs is clearly having great fun, and Izzy is a wonderful teen curmudgeon (“Never mind…my father remains useless”). Another Izzy and Elton adventure is planned.
A thoroughly enjoyable mystery with a wonderfully engaging protagonist.Pub Date: May 22, 2023
ISBN: 9798985675757
Page Count: 378
Publisher: Borne Back Books
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away.
A Mexican American boy takes on heavy responsibilities when his family is torn apart.
Mateo’s life is turned upside down the day U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents show up unsuccessfully seeking his Pa at his New York City bodega. The Garcias live in fear until the day both parents are picked up; his Pa is taken to jail and his Ma to a detention center. The adults around Mateo offer support to him and his 7-year-old sister, Sophie, however, he knows he is now responsible for caring for her and the bodega as well as trying to survive junior year—that is, if he wants to fulfill his dream to enter the drama program at the Tisch School of the Arts and become an actor. Mateo’s relationships with his friends Kimmie and Adam (a potential love interest) also suffer repercussions as he keeps his situation a secret. Kimmie is half Korean (her other half is unspecified) and Adam is Italian American; Mateo feels disconnected from them, less American, and with worries they can’t understand. He talks himself out of choosing a safer course of action, a decision that deepens the story. Mateo’s self-awareness and inner monologue at times make him seem older than 16, and, with significant turmoil in the main plot, some side elements feel underdeveloped. Aleman’s narrative joins the ranks of heart-wrenching stories of migrant families who have been separated.
An ode to the children of migrants who have been taken away. (Fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-7595-5605-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 22, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting, brutal and beautifully told.
A devastating tale of greed and secrets springs from the summer that tore Cady’s life apart.
Cady Sinclair’s family uses its inherited wealth to ensure that each successive generation is blond, beautiful and powerful. Reunited each summer by the family patriarch on his private island, his three adult daughters and various grandchildren lead charmed, fairy-tale lives (an idea reinforced by the periodic inclusions of Cady’s reworkings of fairy tales to tell the Sinclair family story). But this is no sanitized, modern Disney fairy tale; this is Cinderella with her stepsisters’ slashed heels in bloody glass slippers. Cady’s fairy-tale retellings are dark, as is the personal tragedy that has led to her examination of the skeletons in the Sinclair castle’s closets; its rent turns out to be extracted in personal sacrifices. Brilliantly, Lockhart resists simply crucifying the Sinclairs, which might make the family’s foreshadowed tragedy predictable or even satisfying. Instead, she humanizes them (and their painful contradictions) by including nostalgic images that showcase the love shared among Cady, her two cousins closest in age, and Gat, the Heathcliff-esque figure she has always loved. Though increasingly disenchanted with the Sinclair legacy of self-absorption, the four believe family redemption is possible—if they have the courage to act. Their sincere hopes and foolish naïveté make the teens’ desperate, grand gesture all that much more tragic.
Riveting, brutal and beautifully told. (Fiction. 14 & up)Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-385-74126-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
PROFILES
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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