Island

July 12, 2019

Gr 10 Up-When 17-year-old Konrad finds his father dead at the bottom of a ravine, his twin brother Key confesses potential responsibility. However, of the twins, Key has always been calm and caring while Rad's emotions are extreme, typically tending toward rage. Before contacting the police, Rad seeks the truth, but his twin's inability to explain their father's death triggers an outburst of fury followed by dejection and a consideration of the family's history. Through Rad's scattered account of the past, readers learn that the twins' mother died suddenly years earlier, that their father was mentally ill, and that Rad failed to sustain what could have been an amorous relationship with his best friend. Rad's disjointed retelling often stops mid-sentence or abruptly changes perspective, making the teen an unreliable and rather confusing narrator, and although the twins have long been left to care for themselves, Rad reads older than his age and Key older still. Readers will struggle through the work's long digressions into the meaning of happiness and the often-forced idea of the island as a metaphor. VERDICT Rather than the history of Rad's family that is conveyed, readers will be left wishing for the side of the story they do not receive.-Maggie Mason Smith, Clemson University, SC

Copyright 2019 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 15, 2019
Seventeen-year-old Konrad "Rad" Schoe's mentally ill father is dead, and he doesn't know how to feel about it.When Rad's twin brother, Key, claims he might be responsible for the fact that their father's body is lying dead at the bottom of a ravine, Rad doesn't know whether to believe him. Key has always been calm and loving while Rad is haunted by intense emotions that often manifest in fits of rage, much like their father's. As Rad tries to understand what happened--and to protect his brother from the police--he tells the story of how their family fell apart, including his father's first mental breakdown and his mother's sudden death. Throughout, Rad struggles to keep his hold on reality--and to fight his fear that he may suffer from the same mental illness that runs in his family. Rad's erratic voice, which includes truncated sentences and quick changes in perspective, is darkly poetic but often reads much older than his age. Furthermore, the unresolved plot points make the novel feel more like literary fiction than young adult. The island metaphor that runs throughout sometimes feels forced, as do the romantic relationships. Rad and his family are white and working class, Key is queer, and two secondary characters are implied biracial (Korean/white).A psychological portrait of a family torn apart by grief and mental illness that is, at times, overly dramatic. (Fiction. 16-adult)

COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

May 1, 2019
Grades 9-12 Fraternal twins Rad and Key have opposite temperaments?Rad's weatherlike moods rage and rapidly shift, while Key provides a centered calm to their dynamic. It's therefore a shock when Rad comes home and finds his brother on the cliffside platform behind their house and their father's broken body on the rocks below. Could even-keeled Key have killed their father? The pages that follow plot a wandering and surreal course through Rad's psyche, peppered with his fixation on literal and metaphorical islands, flashbacks, visits from his mother's ghost, and his struggle to control his emotions. Rad periodically addresses the reader during tangents, and Key's thoughts interrupt his brother's stream-of-consciousness narration, ultimately creating an amalgam of memory and detail that bear on the terrible scene at hand. Downes (Ten Miles One Way, 2017) once again makes an interesting study of mental illness and the radiating effects an individual's struggles can have. Though never labeled, depression, violence, and paranoia swirl within a narrative that also makes space for love and understanding, where bridges triumph over isolation.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)