Shrewd, empathetic observations distinguish this Québecois import.
A teenager wrestles with complicated feelings, family secrets, and deep frustration in this title translated from French.
When 14-year-old Franny’s widower father, a hobbyist inventor, gets the chance to travel to Kyoto to participate in a contest, she’s uprooted from Montreal to the “suburban hellscape” of St. Lorette to live with maternal relatives she never knew she had. To say that Franny resists is an understatement. Ruefully acknowledging that she has “a knack for acting first and thinking…later,” Franny navigates her transition with one instance of self-sabotage after another. But she eventually overcomes her aversion to new classmate Leona’s dorkiness to make friends and warms up to her aunt Lorette’s stepson, Henry. The three kids buckle down together to solve the mysteries surrounding Franny’s mother’s death. Franny chronicles the events (which span a few months rather than a year) in her diary, the extremely busy design of which involves color-coded dialogue, faux-handwritten annotations, and occasional sketches, courtesy of Ferrer. The illustrations suggest an all-white cast. It isn’t at all convincing as a simulacrum of a diary, but there’s no denying it’s eye-catching. Boulanger’s translation from French is mostly smooth; in it, Franny’s voice is abrasive and frequently includes ableist language, but amid the anger and hurt gleam piercing, often beautiful insights: “Adults are like that. They shape the truth like modeling clay, until things are marginally bearable.” It’s in moments like these that Franny shines.
Shrewd, empathetic observations distinguish this Québecois import. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Nov. 14, 2023
ISBN: 9781646900244
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Arctis Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember.
Kai’s life is upended when his coastal village is devastated in Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami in this verse novel from an author who experienced them firsthand.
With his single mother, her parents, and his friend Ryu among the thousands missing or dead, biracial Kai, 17, is dazed and disoriented. His friend Shin’s supportive, but his intact family reminds Kai, whose American dad has been out of touch for years, of his loss. Kai’s isolation is amplified by his uncertain cultural status. Playing soccer and his growing friendship with shy Keiko barely lessen his despair. Then he’s invited to join a group of Japanese teens traveling to New York to meet others who as teenagers lost parents in the 9/11 attacks a decade earlier. Though at first reluctant, Kai agrees to go and, in the process, begins to imagine a future. Like graphic novels, today’s spare novels in verse (the subgenre concerning disasters especially) are significantly shaped by what’s left out. Lacking art’s visceral power to grab attention, verse novels may—as here—feel sparsely plotted with underdeveloped characters portrayed from a distance in elegiac monotone. Kai’s a generic figure, a coat hanger for the disaster’s main event, his victories mostly unearned; in striking contrast, his rural Japanese community and how they endure catastrophe and overwhelming losses—what they do and don’t do for one another, comforts they miss, kindnesses they value—spring to life.
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember. (author preface, afterword) (Verse fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-53474-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
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