Tag: Courtney Smyth

Posted on by

Review: I Kissed Shara Wheeler by Casey McQuiston

 

I Kissed Shara Wheeler

Casey McQuiston

Macmillan Children’s Books, May 2022

Hardback, £14.99

ISBN 9781529099423

Shara Wheeler is perfect: she’s popular, academic, and the principal of Willowgrove Christian Academy’s daughter. She’s also a natural threat to Chloe Green winning valedictorian and getting out of her small, judgemental town in Alabama for good. Then Shara kisses Chloe a month before graduation and disappears, leaving Chloe confused and reluctantly curious for answers.

Following a set of cryptic, well-designed clues Shara left behind, Chloe teams up for a scavenger hunt with the two main players from Shara’s life — her long-term boyfriend, and the boy-next-door. With the race to graduation on, Chloe is thrown into a world that was right outside her front door the whole time, where she learns that people shouldn’t be judged by who she thinks they are.

I Kissed Shara Wheeler is a necessary and timely queer YA rom-com that presents a fresh take on the ‘mean girl’ trope. McQuiston expertly weaves in an enemies-to-lovers plot and a loveable, well-drawn cast of teens. The book breathlessly shows this cast taking the next steps into adulthood, affirming or discovering their queerness across the full spectrum of the LGBTQ+ umbrella against the backdrop of an unaccepting small town, while also showing that people do not have to behave perfectly to be loved. There are some beautiful, affirming coming out scenes. The premise is deceptively complex, but neatly paced, and everything ties up satisfyingly by the end.  

Courtney Smyth

Posted on by

Sorceress

Sorceress
Celia Rees
Bloomsbury, September 2020
Paperback, 304 pages, £7.99
ISBN 9781526625410

Picking up where the critically-acclaimed The Witch Child left off, Sorceress follows Agnes Herne, a Native American Haudenosaunee woman. She has vivid dreams of Mary Newbury, a witch accused by the church in 1660s Boston. When Agnes contacts Alison Ellman, the person who helped publish Mary’s diaries, she realises her dreams are visions. Agnes’s aunt Miriam calls her back to her reservation where she helps Agnes reach Mary and the continuation of her story through intense, immersive visions.

Twenty years after the publication of The Witch Child, Sorceress is rich with evocative descriptions of places, food, and textures the reader can tangibly experience. A slow-build story, the pay-off begins around 100 pages in when the reader begins to see just how potent Agnes’s dream-memories are. Experiencing Mary’s loss through memory, Agnes is a conduit for readers to feel as Mary felt, suffering pain, grief, loss and joy in the years following the end of her Boston diaries and the beginning of her new life with the Haudenosaunee tribe. Rees tells Agnes and Mary’s story in a dual narrative, skipping through time at the pace real dreams do, occasionally breaking for Agnes to surface from her dreams. Rees manages to vividly bring to life those moments on the edge of sleep and wakefulness. Although I would have liked to have seen more of Agnes’s life and the work she did with Alison, I think this book will continue to hold its own among more recent historical, witch-trial era fiction.

Courtney Smyth