Earnest and uplifting.
Two queer girls go on a journey of love and self-discovery after learning a beloved manga series has gone out of print.
Neesha Sparks is a Black, introverted lesbian who has recently moved with her mother from Queens to North Carolina. On her first day at Durham Western High, she meets fellow new kid—chatty Boricua Gabrielle Graciana, who’s bisexual. Neesha and Gabby are in the same classes after their principal transferred Neesha out of her original honors classes on the erroneous assumption that her cerebral palsy limited her intellectual ability; he soon moves her back into honors classes, and the two girls become inseparable. The unlikely duo find common ground in their love of a manga series called Super Navigator Nozomi, which is about a steampunk spaceship’s engineer and her feelings for the ship’s pilot. Neither have finished the series, so they create a book club of two, but when Neesha discovers that her collection was sold by her father, they embark on a scavenger hunt for the now-out-of-print volumes. As they travel all over the state, the novel, sprinkled with snippets from Navigator Nozomi’s adventures, becomes less about the manga and more about their developing friendship. Both girls have personal struggles from their pasts that could complicate their budding romance. After Neesha's last girlfriend tanked her self-confidence, she hid her disability, history of activism, and love of cosplay. Meanwhile, Gabby is still reeling from her mother’s sudden death a year ago. Despite these serious themes, the novel is sweet and heartfelt with a wholesome romance at its center. The character development is satisfying to watch, especially when paired with Ribeiro’s illustrations, which capture a wide array of emotions in scenes ranging from love confessions to tense arguments. Whitley’s dialogue handles the various issues (orientation, ableism, racism, PTSD, abusive relationships, death) with great care.
Earnest and uplifting.Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2024
ISBN: 9781952303609
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Maverick
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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