NOVEMBER 2014 - AudioFile
Nine well-known YA authors contribute linked stories about 19-year-old Kevin Nichols, who has just committed suicide. Dion Graham reads the parts of the male characters, beginning with Morris, who has just started work at his uncle’s mortuary when Kevin’s body arrives. Graham’s portrayal of Morris is dispassionate, and he affects a different distanced tone as one of Kevin’s friends recounts an initiation ritual. Christina Traister reads the female characters’ stories with more emotion. There’s fury in the story of a young woman Kevin has talked into sex, and feelings run just as strong as a bitter mortuary cosmetologist shows more interest in sorting out her past than in preparing Kevin’s body. The stories, largely bleak and dark, form a disturbing, complex portrait of Kevin and the characters in the linked stories. S.W. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Publishers Weekly
06/16/2014
The second editorial collaboration between Aronson and Smith (after 2011’s Pick-Up Game) collects nine short stories by Ellen Hopkins, A.S. King, Rita Williams-Garcia, Chris Barton, Nora Raleigh Baskin, and more; not unlike Adele Griffin’s The Unfinished Life of Addison Stone, also out this season, the book is built around the influence of a deceased teenager, remembered and considered by those around him. Kevin Nicholas, charismatic and angry, has been shaped by his father’s suicide; eight years later, 19-year-old Kevin’s body is zipped into a bag, and everyone from his younger sister and high school peers to the cosmetologist prettying his corpse dwell on their relationships with Kevin or use his death to evaluate their own lives. Predictably, anything good that people think they knew about Kevin proves false. The girls connect him with sex, the boys with innocence-destroying competition. The impact of many details and events depends on readers’ willingness to read into what is said. There are plenty of dots to connect and introspection from adolescents on the precipice of something new and unknown, but most of these authors have done better in longer formats. Ages 14–up. (Aug.)
From the Publisher
The authors included are all well-known young adult writers, such as Ellen Hopkins, Rita Williams-Garcia, and A. S. King, and it is clear that they know and understand their audience. Despite the differing perspectives and characters, the writing is remarkably consistent in tone. The vignette feel of each section may appeal to reluctant readers who can manage a narrative in small chunks without losing the arc of the story itself. More enthusiastic readers will devour it whole.
—School Library Journal
[The characters'] experiences are sensitively portrayed, and they struggle with very real issues of ethnic and sexual identity. ... Complex and emotionally demanding, this collection aims for and will resonate with serious readers of realistic fiction.
—Kirkus Reviews
Rita Williams-Garcia’s fantastic opener introduces Morris, a blank-minded boy working at his uncle’s mortuary the day Kevin’s corpse arrives. Both Ellen Hopkins and A. S. King look at sexual and romantic relationships; Torrey Maldonado examines one of the young men in Kevin’s thrall; and so on. ... Fascinating.
—Booklist
The talents of the writers, including Rita Garcia-Williams, Ellen Hopkins, A. S. King, Will Weaver, and Nora Raleigh Baskin, keep the stories consistently moving and authentically voiced... Useful as a model for a group creative-writing exercise, this would also make for therapeutic reading and discussion in the aftermath of a tragedy.
—Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
There are plenty of dots to connect and introspection from adolescents on the precipice of something new and unknown.
—Publishers Weekly
NOVEMBER 2014 - AudioFile
Nine well-known YA authors contribute linked stories about 19-year-old Kevin Nichols, who has just committed suicide. Dion Graham reads the parts of the male characters, beginning with Morris, who has just started work at his uncle’s mortuary when Kevin’s body arrives. Graham’s portrayal of Morris is dispassionate, and he affects a different distanced tone as one of Kevin’s friends recounts an initiation ritual. Christina Traister reads the female characters’ stories with more emotion. There’s fury in the story of a young woman Kevin has talked into sex, and feelings run just as strong as a bitter mortuary cosmetologist shows more interest in sorting out her past than in preparing Kevin’s body. The stories, largely bleak and dark, form a disturbing, complex portrait of Kevin and the characters in the linked stories. S.W. © AudioFile 2014, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2014-06-10
The death of Kevin, at once charismatic and tortured, is at the epicenter of this collection of short stories by nine well-known authors for teens, exploring the lives of his peers, acquaintances and family as it reveals how each of them is affected.A withdrawn 18-year-old is clamped firmly under the guiding wing of his uncle, a mortician, in the opening piece that begins an intricate weaving together of a host of seemingly unconnected characters. Many of the older teens in these vignettes are troubled, unable to make sense of their places in families that don’t understand or accept them and searching for belonging instead with their friends. Their experiences are sensitively portrayed, and they struggle with very real issues of ethnic and sexual identity. The overall tone is unrelentingly bleak, perhaps in part because the window offered into each of their lives is so brief. Some barely knew Kevin, and others cared for him deeply, even as they were hurt by his emotional unavailability, the stage for which was set when he was young by his father’s suicide. One story even concerns a character who didn’t know him at all, viewing the tragedy through the technological disconnect distinctive to modern social media.Complex and emotionally demanding, this collection aims for and will resonate with serious readers of realistic fiction. (Short stories. 14-20)
