An uneven melodrama.
Three tween girls dabble in witchcraft but discover the magic of friendship.
Eighth grader Sophia, along with friends Mia and Alexis, attempt to use Mia’s knowledge of witchcraft (gleaned from the internet) to cast spells. Together, they sit in a circle and call upon elemental spirits, each hoping to find a solution to their emotional wounds. Mia struggles with self-harm, Alexis grieves for her deceased dog, and Sophia is heartbroken thanks to feckless ex-boyfriend Aidan’s cheating, prompting her to cast a love spell to get him back. One by one, the spells appear to come true, but Sophia’s friends help her realize that she deserves a more empowering journey toward self-love. The narrative, told from Sophia’s first-person perspective, develops parallels between her absentee father and Aidan, sources of rejection that prompt her recovery. Sophia’s voice is humorously exaggerated and obsessive when referring to Aidan. The confessional style, written with reluctant and struggling readers in mind, features repetitive dialogue with little exposition. The narrative moves disjointedly through time, however, jumping between the present and flashbacks, before leaping two years into the future, which may cause confusion. The secondary characters unfortunately feel typecast rather than like well-rounded people. Mia’s sudden healing, for example, skips over the nuances of self-harm and her need for non-magical solutions. The book’s physical design offers greater accessibility for those with dyslexia. Main characters read white.
An uneven melodrama. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: April 2, 2024
ISBN: 9781454954880
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Union Square & Co.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 5, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel,...
Adventure drags our heroine all over the map of fantasyland while giving her the opportunity to use her smarts.
Elisa—Princess Lucero-Elisa de Riqueza of Orovalle—has been chosen for Service since the day she was born, when a beam of holy light put a Godstone in her navel. She's a devout reader of holy books and is well-versed in the military strategy text Belleza Guerra, but she has been kept in ignorance of world affairs. With no warning, this fat, self-loathing princess is married off to a distant king and is embroiled in political and spiritual intrigue. War is coming, and perhaps only Elisa's Godstone—and knowledge from the Belleza Guerra—can save them. Elisa uses her untried strategic knowledge to always-good effect. With a character so smart that she doesn't have much to learn, body size is stereotypically substituted for character development. Elisa’s "mountainous" body shrivels away when she spends a month on forced march eating rat, and thus she is a better person. Still, it's wonderfully refreshing to see a heroine using her brain to win a war rather than strapping on a sword and charging into battle.
Despite the stale fat-to-curvy pattern, compelling world building with a Southern European, pseudo-Christian feel, reminiscent of Naomi Kritzer's Fires of the Faithful (2002), keeps this entry fresh. (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-202648-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember.
Kai’s life is upended when his coastal village is devastated in Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami in this verse novel from an author who experienced them firsthand.
With his single mother, her parents, and his friend Ryu among the thousands missing or dead, biracial Kai, 17, is dazed and disoriented. His friend Shin’s supportive, but his intact family reminds Kai, whose American dad has been out of touch for years, of his loss. Kai’s isolation is amplified by his uncertain cultural status. Playing soccer and his growing friendship with shy Keiko barely lessen his despair. Then he’s invited to join a group of Japanese teens traveling to New York to meet others who as teenagers lost parents in the 9/11 attacks a decade earlier. Though at first reluctant, Kai agrees to go and, in the process, begins to imagine a future. Like graphic novels, today’s spare novels in verse (the subgenre concerning disasters especially) are significantly shaped by what’s left out. Lacking art’s visceral power to grab attention, verse novels may—as here—feel sparsely plotted with underdeveloped characters portrayed from a distance in elegiac monotone. Kai’s a generic figure, a coat hanger for the disaster’s main event, his victories mostly unearned; in striking contrast, his rural Japanese community and how they endure catastrophe and overwhelming losses—what they do and don’t do for one another, comforts they miss, kindnesses they value—spring to life.
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember. (author preface, afterword) (Verse fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-53474-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
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