by Ian Doescher ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 23, 2019
Tina Fey’s Mean Girls gets a Shakespearean script treatment.
As in the 2004 film, home-schooled teenager Cady Heron leaves Africa with her anthropologist parents and enters American high school, where she first spies on popular Plastics-leader Regina George, then emulates the queen bee, alienating her newfound real friends, Damian and Janis, and crush, Aaron. No mere novelization of the movie (itself based on a nonfiction book), it embraces Elizabethan theater conventions, with Doescher (Jedi the Last, 2018, etc.) translating cinematic tropes and tricks into their early modern equivalents—asides, chorus, and balcony scenes. Blatantly lifting speeches from the Bard, other lines swing between jarringly modern and pseudo-Shakespearean, with the juxtaposition played for comedic effect. The iambic pentameter (mostly prose) usually works, in style if not in syntax. Purists may scoff, but this play attempts and mostly succeeds at reviving Shakespeare as popular entertainment for the masses. Audiences already familiar with the film’s plots, memorable lines, and pop-culture references will be well-equipped to tackle the Shakespearean treatment rather than facing an impenetrable thicket of academic allusions, archaic language, history lessons, and Latin grammar jokes. However, the author’s afterword assertion that “Shakespeare’s female characters were never as strong as those of Tina Fey’s creation” better befits the Burn Book’s slander.
Creating a modern Shakespeare play is no Mean feat. (dramatis personae, afterword, sonnet) (Fiction. 12-18)Pub Date: April 23, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-68369-117-4
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Quirk Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION
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by Ian Doescher ; illustrated by Tim Budgen
by Adam Silvera ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 5, 2017
What would you do with one day left to live?
In an alternate present, a company named Death-Cast calls Deckers—people who will die within the coming day—to inform them of their impending deaths, though not how they will happen. The End Day call comes for two teenagers living in New York City: Puerto Rican Mateo and bisexual Cuban-American foster kid Rufus. Rufus needs company after a violent act puts cops on his tail and lands his friends in jail; Mateo wants someone to push him past his comfort zone after a lifetime of playing it safe. The two meet through Last Friend, an app that connects lonely Deckers (one of many ways in which Death-Cast influences social media). Mateo and Rufus set out to seize the day together in their final hours, during which their deepening friendship blossoms into something more. Present-tense chapters, short and time-stamped, primarily feature the protagonists’ distinctive first-person narrations. Fleeting third-person chapters give windows into the lives of other characters they encounter, underscoring how even a tiny action can change the course of someone else’s life. It’s another standout from Silvera (History Is All You Left Me, 2017, etc.), who here grapples gracefully with heavy questions about death and the meaning of a life well-lived.
Engrossing, contemplative, and as heart-wrenching as the title promises. (Speculative fiction. 13-adult).Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-245779-0
Page Count: 384
Publisher: HarperTeen
Review Posted Online: June 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2017
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES
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BOOK TO SCREEN
PROFILES
by Kathleen Glasgow ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 30, 2016
After surviving a suicide attempt, a fragile teen isn't sure she can endure without cutting herself.
Seventeen-year-old Charlie Davis, a white girl living on the margins, thinks she has little reason to live: her father drowned himself; her bereft and abusive mother kicked her out; her best friend, Ellis, is nearly brain dead after cutting too deeply; and she's gone through unspeakable experiences living on the street. After spending time in treatment with other young women like her—who cut, burn, poke, and otherwise hurt themselves—Charlie is released and takes a bus from the Twin Cities to Tucson to be closer to Mikey, a boy she "like-likes" but who had pined for Ellis instead. But things don't go as planned in the Arizona desert, because sweet Mikey just wants to be friends. Feeling rejected, Charlie, an artist, is drawn into a destructive new relationship with her sexy older co-worker, a "semifamous" local musician who's obviously a junkie alcoholic. Through intense, diarylike chapters chronicling Charlie's journey, the author captures the brutal and heartbreaking way "girls who write their pain on their bodies" scar and mar themselves, either succumbing or surviving. Like most issue books, this is not an easy read, but it's poignant and transcendent as Charlie breaks more and more before piecing herself back together.
This grittily provocative debut explores the horrors of self-harm and the healing power of artistic expression. (author’s note) (Fiction. 14 & up)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-101-93471-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT FICTION | TEENS & YOUNG ADULT SOCIAL THEMES
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