Karen Rivers

I love the beautiful cover of a humpback whale! Natalia Rose Baleine Gallagher and her famous actor Dad, XAN GALLAGHER (always in caps!) have moved for the umpteenth time to escape the paparazzi. Their newest home is Sooke, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. They live in a motor home for ease of travel, and so they must be minimalists as they don't have room for too much "stuff." Also, XAN is very eco-minded. I loved Nat and XAN's loving relationship, full of humor and fun. There are many show more references to "girl stuff" (periods, getting boobs) that may deter boys from reading this, but it's reality, and good to have out in the open. Nat's good friend, Harry (born female Harriet) is transgender. Nat and XAN are more accepting of him than his parents. A vacation in Mexico helps Harry's parents see his point of view. Nat also likes learning new languages (her goal is to learn every language in the world!), so Rivers inserts words in different languages. (In her afterword, she explains that she'd been collecting words for some time, knowing she'd use them in a story one day.) One of my favorites is Komorebi, the Japanese word for sunlight filtering through trees. Reading this book makes me want to read other books by this author. show less

Mischa “Ish” Love is a precocious 12-year-old who is heavily into science and environmentalism, to the chagrin of her mom, who wishes she would be more relaxed and enjoy life more. (Ish says her mom “has obviously mistaken me for an ice dancer or a regular girl…”)

Ish for her part is frustrated that she is the only one who seems to be taking the planet seriously, while other kids “run around and throw their candy wrappers into the wind and assume someone else is going to clean up show more their mess.”

Ish did, however, have a great deal of fun when her BFF, Tig Diaz, lived next door, but he moved away nine months prior, and she hasn’t heard a word from him since. Tig shared her concerns and dreams, but just dropped her without a word. She tries to pretend he is just “dead to her” now, but she misses him, and is lonely and hurt.

She tries to think about other things, and occupies her time planning for her eventual immigration to Mars as part of the “Mars Now” project that purports to be equipping Mars for settlements in ten years. She will be 22 then and just knows she will be perfect, if only they will accept her into the program. She and Tig had spent six years planning for what they would do on Mars and how they would survive. She muses:

“If people were all either flowers or weeds, I’d be a weed. Weeds are survivors. Weed are what they need on Mars. Nothing fragile. No one who will die at the first sign of trouble.”

But alas, Ish turns out to be a flower after all, when it is discovered that she has an aggressive brain tumor. She is told it is the size of a Brussels sprout, so she calls it that, or Nirgal, which was how the ancient Bablylonians referred to Mars - Nirgal meant “death star.”

The rest of the book takes us through the states Ish goes through - the sadness, the anger, and the fear. But eventually she manages to find acceptance of her situation:

“Like you imagine your life is this elaborate line that twists and curls and makes beautiful pictures, but the real beauty of life is that it isn’t like that at all. It’s a meteor, streaking across the sky. Meteors don’t twist and turn. They just cut straight across, faster than you ever imagined.”

Ish undergoes chemotherapy and radiation, but the tumor grows fast, and takes over larger portions of her brain. She loses more and more of a sense of her surroundings, increasingly imagining herself living on Mars, planting things, and waiting for everyone else to come. Finally, all she can see are prisms of light - a symphony of light, “playing inside me, singing about all my beautiful forevers.”

Evaluation: This book is not as depressing as it sounds, but it is by no means a “happy” story. The author does an excellent job of describing the processes of hospitalization and chemotherapy, and portraying what it might be like to have brain functions gradually slip away. This little girl’s journey will help kids understand similar situations of sick relatives or friends in their lives. show less

“The thing is, if God is dead, who is looking after us?”

Karen Rivers’ pithy middle grade novel about a girl trapped in a well is an onion—at its surface, we just have a girl who is tricked into falling into a well, much to the delight of a Mean Girls-esque crew at her school. As we progress through the story, our heroine, Kammie, begins to reveal just exactly why she recently moved to Texas, why her father is in prison, and why she even cares what these girls thinks. As Kammie show more begins to suffer from oxygen deprivation, she thinks back to the events that led up to her escapade and even hallucinates about talking goats. By the end of its 215 pages, I was affected, emotionally, by Kammie’s story—it’s certainly not what it seems at first glance. Highly recommended for a quick, thoughtful story. show less

Longing to be one of the popular girls in her new town, Kammie Summers has fallen into a well during a (fake) initiation into their club. Now Kammie’s trapped in the dark, counting the hours, waiting to be rescued. (The Girls have gone for help, haven’t they>As hours pass, Kammie’s real-life predicament mixes with memories of the best and worst moments of her life so far,
including the awful reasons her family moved to this new town in the first place. And as she begins to feel hungry show more and thirsty and light-headed, Kammie starts to imagine she has company, including a French-speaking coyote and goats that just might be zombies.Karen Rivers has created a unique narrator with an authentic, sympathetic, sharp, funny voice who will have readers laughing and crying and laugh-crying over the course of physically and emotionally suspenseful, utterly believable events. show less