Kate Pride’s liberal-minded mother wants her to be a Woman of Purpose, and Kate longs to be like the cool, pierced girls in the magazines who “looked as if they did drugs and had sex even if they didn’t.” But she has an epiphany at a performance of The Crucible, falls in love with playwriting, and moves to Tennessee, where the lessons learned from The Crucible inform her way of surviving a new high school. The authors get the details of small-town Tennessee life right—meat-and-three restaurants, waitresses who call you “honey,” fruit tea, heat and humidity, and statues of Confederate soldiers. It’s the Confederate flag—the “racist flag,” as Kate calls it—that becomes the contentious issue at her new high school, and Kate is the Yankee outsider in the midst of controversy. The novel, which includes a script of the play Kate writes about the flag issue, would make a fine one-two punch with Arthur Miller’s play in a high-school classroom. (afterword) (Fiction. 12+)
Pub Date: March 9, 2004
ISBN: 0-385-32749-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
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A dystopic thriller joins the crowded shelves but doesn't distinguish itself.
Juliette was torn from her home and thrown into an asylum by The Reestablishment, a militaristic regime in control since an environmental catastrophe left society in ruins. Juliette’s journal holds her tortured thoughts in an attempt to repress memories of the horrific act that landed her in a cell. Mysteriously, Juliette’s touch kills. After months of isolation, her captors suddenly give her a cellmate—Adam, a drop-dead gorgeous guy. Adam, it turns out, is immune to her deadly touch. Unfortunately, he’s a soldier under orders from Warner, a power-hungry 19-year-old. But Adam belongs to a resistance movement; he helps Juliette escape to their stronghold, where she finds that she’s not the only one with superhuman abilities. The ending falls flat as the plot devolves into comic-book territory. Fast-paced action scenes convey imminent danger vividly, but there’s little sense of a broader world here. Overreliance on metaphor to express Juliette’s jaw-dropping surprise wears thin: “My mouth is sitting on my kneecaps. My eyebrows are dangling from the ceiling.” For all of her independence and superpowers, Juliette never moves beyond her role as a pawn in someone else’s schemes.
Part cautionary tale, part juicy love story, this will appeal to action and adventure fans who aren't yet sick of the genre. (Science fiction. 12 & up)Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-208548-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: HarperTeen
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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Can teenage love ever be forever?
Isabel (Belly) from The Summer I Turned Pretty (2009) and It’s Not Summer Without You (2010) finishes up her freshman year at college somewhat unconvincingly committed to Jeremiah Fisher, one of the two brothers with whom she has spent summers since she was small. Isabel becomes furious to learn that Jeremiah had sex with another girl from their college in Cabo on spring break, but he wins back her affections with a grand gesture: a proposal of marriage. Caught up in the idea—she will plan a summer wedding! they will attend college as a married couple!—Isabel tries ignores her misgivings about Jeremiah, the appalled silence of her mother and her own still-strong feelings for Jeremiah’s older brother, Conrad. It’s both funny and believable when Jeremiah insists he wants to dance the wedding dance to “You Never Can Tell” from the Pulp Fiction soundtrack. Han gives a satisfying nod to wedding-planning fantasies even while revealing their flimsy basis for an actual marriage. A final chapter in 23-year-old Isabel’s voice reveals the not-so-surprising happy ending.
Han’s impressive ear for and pitch-perfect reproduction of the interactions between not-quite-adult older teens make this an appealing conclusion to this trilogy romance among bright middle-class young people. (Fiction. 12 & up)Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4169-9558-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 5, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2011
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FAMILY | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT ROMANCE
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