Brilliantly executed: a gem that’s a love letter to theater and summer camp.
During their sixth summer at Lamplighter Lake Summer Camp for the Arts, two girls’ broken friendship is tested even further.
Thirteen-year-olds Eowyn Becker and Jules Marrigan became best friends during their first Wisconsin camp summer. Over the years, though, their friendship has developed cracks. Talented Eowyn suffers from severe stage fright, desperately misses her deceased mother, and resents her doctor father and Broadway-star brother, who have little time for her. She covets Jules’ supportive family and effortless onstage presence. For her part, West Virginian scholarship camper Jules covets Eowyn’s wealth and connections and feels that Eowyn doesn’t understand her less-fortunate circumstances. Jules is also bothered by Eowyn’s oblivious need for attention, which ruined last summer’s show, taking the spotlight off Jules in her lead role. When both girls (who present white) earn starring roles in Wicked this summer, can they, like Galinda and Elphaba, find their way past their mutual loathing and become friends who truly see each other? Told in Eowyn’s first-person voice in the present and Jules’ third-person perspective in the past, this masterful exploration of friendship gone wrong is permeated with a bone-deep, warts-and-all love of both camp and theater. Evocative worldbuilding brings Lamplighter to life for the intimately developed, well-intentioned characters, who often struggle to see other points of view. The well-paced interweaving of multiple summers’ experiences builds tension and shines light on how the past reverberates into the present.
Brilliantly executed: a gem that’s a love letter to theater and summer camp. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Nov. 19, 2024
ISBN: 9780063321731
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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