An authentically textured account of a young teen coping with a parent’s mental illness.
A 13-year-old boy struggles with the pain, anger, and sadness of living with his father, who struggles with mental illness.
Mohammad Mirza and his abbu, Mumtaz, move from Queens to Houston to stay with Naila Phupo, Abbu’s widowed sister, and her son, Rayyan—Abbu can’t keep a job, and they have nowhere to live. Mo’s mother, Becky Eckert, an engineer and UNESCO fellow who’s cued white, is away working in a refugee camp in Greece for two years. Abbu, who’s Pakistani American, has paranoid schizophrenia; life has been difficult for Mo, with Abbu’s raging episodes and his parents’ constant arguments. In Texas, Mo grows close to Rayyan, who’s also 13, and his devoutly Muslim aunt, who cares for him attentively. Mo loves desi folktales (which are woven into the book), learning, music, and art, but he acts tough to defend his soft interior against more pain. He harbors deep anger toward his father and longs for his mother, whom he connects with on occasional video calls. Eventually Mo must decide: Can he change the narratives he’s long held about his life, himself, and Abbu? The story is engrossing, populated with appealing, well-rounded main and supporting characters. The portrayal of serious mental illness and the complex emotions of a child whose parent suffers from it are realistic, eye-opening, and moving.
An authentically textured account of a young teen coping with a parent’s mental illness. (author’s note) (Fiction. 10-13)Pub Date: March 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780063115859
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: tomorrow
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
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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