Jason & Kyra
Davidson, a high school teacher, debuts with a tried-and-true teen romance, unusual chiefly for its setting in an affluent black suburb of Detroit. Jason, 16, is gorgeous, smart, graceful on the basketball court, and he dates popular, beautiful Lisa. But "fine-as-hell, super-jock, popular-as-Nikes-in-the-NBA, can-have-anybody-he-wants" Jason falls for "double-brained-nappy-headed-sweet-but-nobody" Kyra, his nonconformist, highly academic research partner from AP English class. Davidson describes the beginnings of their mutual attraction in spine-tinglingly prolonged detail, effectively camouflaging the staple elements of her plot: only Kyra understands that Jason, whose mother died when he was three and whose father leaves on frequent business trips, experiences his solitude as loneliness, not as freedom to do as he likes; Lisa, furious at being dumped by Jason, gets revenge in a manner that will be familiar to readers of middle-grade and YA fiction. But other story lines advance the narrative, too, such as Kyra's dedication to her project for a Westinghouse-like national science competition. Readers with an appetite for love stories are likely to follow Jason and Kyra's pas de deux from its beginning straight through to its satisfying end. Ages 12-up.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.