Talk - Hardcover

Koja, Kathe

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374373825 ISBN 13: 9780374373825

Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), 2005

Inhaltsangabe

A powerful drama about self-acceptance

Kit Webster is hiding a secret. Carma, his best friend, has already figured it out, and pushes him to audition for the high school play, Talk. When he's cast as the male lead, he expects to escape his own life for a while and become a different person. What he gets instead is the role of a lifetime: Kit Webster. In the play, Kit's thrown together with Lindsay Walsh, the female lead and the school's teen queen. Lindsay, tired of the shallow and selfish boys from her usual circle of friends, sees something real in Kit - and wants it. But Kit's attention is focused on Pablo, another boy in school. The play is controversial; the parents put pressure on the school to shut it down. And when Kit and Lindsay rally to save Talk, they find themselves deep into a battle for the truth: onstage, and inside themselves.

As in her other books, Ms. Koja's "long stream-of-consciousness sentences with creative (but recognizable) spelling and clever use of italics will enchant readers" (Booklist).

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kathe Koja is the author of The Blue Mirror; Buddha Boy, an ALA Best Book for Young Adults and an IRA Children's Book Award for Young Adult Fiction; and straydog. She lives in Berkley, Michigan.

Rezensionen

Grade 8 Up–Closeted high schooler Kit Webster hopes to take a vacation from reality by accepting one of the leads in a school play called Talk. Opposite Kit is popular drama queen Lindsay Walsh, who falls for him while they're onstage and dumps her meathead boyfriend. He blames Kit and homophobic epithets ensue. At the same time, the town turns upside down over the play's strong content, and soon nearly everyone is in an uproar. Told in Kit's and Lindsay's alternating voices, and with portions of the script inserted throughout, this novel breaks no new ground literarily or thematically. Readers will find the uncertain chemistry between the protagonists intriguing, but the vague controversy surrounding the play and free-speech rallies quickly become didactic and tiresome. Koja's stream-of-conscious style enhances the story's sense of realism, but the characterizations seem flat and polarized compared to other straight/gay romantic muddles like Alex Sanchez's So Hard to Say (2004) or Ellen Wittlinger's Hard Love (1999, both S & S). Still, reluctant readers may be tempted enough by the volume's slim size and simplistic themes to see it through to the end.–Hillias J. Martin, New York Public Library

Gr. 8-11. Other people may be surprised when Kit, who has never acted before, wins the lead in the high-school play. But he isn't. He knows the truth: he's been acting all his life, pretending to be straight. Things become increasingly complicated for the closeted teen when his difficult costar, Lindsay, falls in love with him, and their play, Talk, a hard-hitting drama about political repression, excites controversy and parental attempts at censorship. The action of this ambitious novel moves along briskly when it alternates between Kit and Lindsay's points of view, but it becomes message-driven when pages from the play are periodically included to reinforce the theme: that the self is revealed no matter what. Fortunately, Kit's true self is interesting and sympathetic enough to hold the reader's attention through the occasional didactic patches, and the author's nicely realized denouement is both life- and self-affirming. Michael Cart
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0374373825
• ISBN 13: 9780374373825
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 144
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar