“Someday I may fly away for good, but for now I watch and wait.” Malaak Abed Atieh, an 11-year-old Palestinian girl lives in Gaza, spending her free time on the roof with her birds. Her father has disappeared, her brother Hamid wants to be a fighter with the militant extremists, and older sister Hend thinks of marriage, but, as mother says, “How can we have wedding celebrations when there have been so many funerals?” Dreams of peace and threats of war are symbolized by the birds on Malaak’s roof and the stones in Hamid’s hand. As the tensions between Palestinians and Israelis escalate and Hamid edges closer to the violence of the intifada, Malaak knows she can no longer dream her days away on her rooftop sanctuary. Her mother tells her that her father, along with other Palestinians and Israelis, has died in a bus bombed by an Arab terrorist. Malaak must do what she can to steer Hamid away from a similar fate. Father believed in a Palestinian homeland but not in terrorism, yet he was killed by Islamic Jihad; Hamid’s friends have been killed by Israeli soldiers. And mother cries, “No son of mine will ever be a member of Islamic Jihad.” The complexities of the situation—of families wanting peace, of dreams of a place to call home, and the allure of militant groups to fighters such as Hamid—are woven into this powerful portrayal told in spare, poetic prose. Clinton takes her readers seriously and presents history and politics in an engaging, human story of one young girl and her family. There are no neat resolutions here, only a fully realized account, told with compassion and hope. The beautiful writing and timely subject warrant a wide audience for this must-read. (author’s note, glossary) (Fiction. 11+)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7636-1388-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American...
Crystal-clear prose poems paint a heart-rending picture of 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa’s journey from Seattle to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.
This vividly wrought story of displacement, told from Mina’s first-person perspective, begins as it did for so many Japanese-Americans: with the bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. The backlash of her Seattle community is instantaneous (“Jap, Jap, Jap, the word bounces / around the walls of the hall”), and Mina chronicles its effects on her family with a heavy heart. “I am an American, I scream / in my head, but my mouth is stuffed / with rocks; my body is a stone, like the statue / of a little Buddha Grandpa prays to.” When Roosevelt decrees that West Coast Japanese-Americans are to be imprisoned in inland camps, the Tagawas board up their house, leaving the cat, Grandpa’s roses and Mina’s best friend behind. Following the Tagawas from Washington’s Puyallup Assembly Center to Idaho’s Minidoka Relocation Center (near the titular town of Eden), the narrative continues in poems and letters. In them, injustices such as endless camp lines sit alongside even larger ones, such as the government’s asking interned young men, including Mina’s brother, to fight for America.
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American internment. (historical note) (Verse/historical fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8075-1739-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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