Princess Sylvie, the plucky and brave heroine of The Great Good Thing (2001), returns to adventures old and new in this brilliantly imagined sequel. She’s now back in print, and instead of there being only one copy of her story in an old house, there are hundreds of copies with new readers. Actually, it’s wearing out all the characters, since people seem to be reading morning, noon, and night, with barely a pause. When their tale is uploaded onto the web, things get even worse, because the words scroll upwards and the characters have to play their lines differently. Even though Sylvie appears in The Writer’s dreams to suggest they are having a hard time of it, the character who The Writer inserts—a Yoga instructor named Rosetta Stein who’s a silent shepherdess in Sylvie’s story—brings some respite but may cause more trouble, too. Then things get really bad, when first parts of words, then great blocks of text, begin to disappear. Sylvie must negotiate the electronic insides of a computer, complete with bots and cookies, to save her story, and her existence. Besides the parallel tales in and outside of the volume, Townley plays wonderfully with ideas: how does a story happen? Why do characters behave as they do? What is more real, readers who come and go, or characters who live on the page (or on the Web) forever? This is all done in vivid, sparkling language, and knowing readers will see references to everything from TV’s Jay Leno to Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. (Fiction. 10+)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-689-84615-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Richard Jackson/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
Small but mighty necessary reading.
A miniature manifesto for radical queer acceptance that weaves together the personal and political.
Eli, a cis gay white Jewish man, uses his own identities and experiences to frame and acknowledge his perspective. In the prologue, Eli compares the global Jewish community to the global queer community, noting, “We don’t always get it right, but the importance of showing up for other Jews has been carved into the DNA of what it means to be Jewish. It is my dream that queer people develop the same ideology—what I like to call a Global Queer Conscience.” He details his own isolating experiences as a queer adolescent in an Orthodox Jewish community and reflects on how he and so many others would have benefitted from a robust and supportive queer community. The rest of the book outlines 10 principles based on the belief that an expectation of mutual care and concern across various other dimensions of identity can be integrated into queer community values. Eli’s prose is clear, straightforward, and powerful. While he makes some choices that may be divisive—for example, using the initialism LGBTQIAA+ which includes “ally”—he always makes clear those are his personal choices and that the language is ever evolving.
Small but mighty necessary reading. (resources) (Nonfiction. 14-18)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09368-9
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Historical fiction examines the famous case of Emmett Till, whose murder was one of the triggers of the civil-rights movement. Hiram Hillburn knows R.C. Rydell is evil. He watches R.C. mutilate a catfish, but does nothing to stop him. “I didn’t want to end up like that fish,” he says. He watches R.C. throw stones at a neighbor’s house and humiliate 14-year-old Emmett Till, an African-American visitor from Chicago, and still he does nothing. Hiram says, “When things are scary or dangerous, it’s hard to see clear what to do.” When Till is brutally murdered, Hiram is sure R.C. is involved. Hiram, a white teenager who has come back to the Mississippi town where his father grew up, is the narrator and the perspective of the white outsider and the layers of his moral reflection make this an excellent examination of a difficult topic. When the case comes to trial, Hiram knows he must face his own trial: can he stand up to evil and do the right thing? He knows Mr. Paul, the local storeowner, is right: “Figure out what’s right and what’s wrong, and make yourself do the right thing. Do that and no matter what happens, no matter what people say, you’ll have no regrets.” This is a complicated thing to do, as Hiram must summon inner strength and come to terms with who he is—the son of an English professor who hates everything about the South and the grandson of a farmer who loves everything about it. Teen readers will find themselves caught up in Hiram’s very real struggle to do the right thing. (Fiction. YA)
Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8037-2745-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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