The bestselling author of the Princess Diaries series turns to a different head of state in a comedy about a privileged but disaffected adolescent girl whose life undergoes a radical transformation when she instinctively jumps on a gunman, foiling his plan to assassinate the president. Samantha Madison, who dyes all her clothing black to show her high-minded solidarity with the hungry, the homeless, and the art-program–deprived, is anything but a heroic figure. The middle child in an overachieving Washington, D.C., family, Samantha is stuck between her pretty and popular older sister, Lucy, a cheerleader “whose primary concern . . . is not missing a single sale at Club Monaco” and her super-smart younger sister, Rebecca, who is so brilliant that she’s “practically an idiot savant.” Worse, Samantha is madly in love with Lucy’s boyfriend, Jack, an alienated, earring-wearing, aspiring artist who not so incidentally also happens to be a hunk. Written in the first person, Cabot’s strength is her heroine’s funny, authentic voice, though her utilization of trendy labels and extreme colloquial style may limit the material’s longevity. After saving the president’s life, Samantha is suddenly catapulted from nobody to national hero in the world at large and from social outcast to social arbiter in the microcosm of her school. Ambivalence over her burgeoning celebrity and mushrooming popularity, coupled with high-level political conflicts involving her new duties as the US teen ambassador to the UN and a budding but bumpy relationship with the first son, keeps the plot rolling, all the way to its satisfying, distinctively American conclusion. Great fun. (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-06-029469-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2002
The wish-fulfilling title and sun-washed, catalog-beautiful teens on the cover will be enticing for girls looking for a...
Han’s leisurely paced, somewhat somber narrative revisits several beach-house summers in flashback through the eyes of now 15-year-old Isabel, known to all as Belly.
Belly measures her growing self by these summers and by her lifelong relationship with the older boys, her brother and her mother’s best friend’s two sons. Belly’s dawning awareness of her sexuality and that of the boys is a strong theme, as is the sense of summer as a separate and reflective time and place: Readers get glimpses of kisses on the beach, her best friend’s flirtations during one summer’s visit, a first date. In the background the two mothers renew their friendship each year, and Lauren, Belly’s mother, provides support for her friend—if not, unfortunately, for the children—in Susannah’s losing battle with breast cancer. Besides the mostly off-stage issue of a parent’s severe illness there’s not much here to challenge most readers—driving, beer-drinking, divorce, a moment of surprise at the mothers smoking medicinal pot together.
The wish-fulfilling title and sun-washed, catalog-beautiful teens on the cover will be enticing for girls looking for a diversion. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4169-6823-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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
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