A powerful novel explores the toll that abduction by a non-custodial parent takes on one girl's identity. Elsie McPhee's narration quickly cues the reader to the oddness of her life. She lives in an anonymous apartment with her brother Tommy, forbidden by her mother to leave the building or to form relationships with anyone. When Elsie disobeys to play with the new neighbors, her mother yanks the family away to yet another anonymous apartment in yet another town. Flashbacks flesh out the story: Elsie is really L.C. (Linda Clay) McGee, and her parents divorced when they disagreed about the appropriateness of seeking help for her slow, unusually withdrawn little brother. For the past four years, since their mother snatched them from a playground, the little family has been on the move, and Elsie/L.C. has suppressed memory of her earlier life. A crisis in Tommy's health and her growing understanding of their mother's fundamental instability prompt Elsie to seek help and turn her mother in. Rodowsky (Spindrift, 2000) avoids an easy ending, continuing the novel past the children's reunion with their father and tackling the difficulties the girl—she renames herself Clay—faces in returning to her former life and coming to grips with her brother's autism. The novel has many of the characteristics of a movie-of-the-week and secondary characters tend toward one-dimensionality, but strong storytelling and the convincing exploration of Clay's confusion as she confronts her tremendous fear of and simultaneous intense love for her mother save it from triteness. (Fiction. 9-13)
Pub Date: March 13, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-31338-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The poster boy for relentless mischief-makers everywhere, first encountered in No, David! (1998), gives his weary mother a rest by going to school. Naturally, he’s tardy, and that’s but the first in a long string of offenses—“Sit down, David! Keep your hands to yourself! PAY ATTENTION!”—that culminates in an afterschool stint. Children will, of course, recognize every line of the text and every one of David’s moves, and although he doesn’t exhibit the larger- than-life quality that made him a tall-tale anti-hero in his first appearance, his round-headed, gap-toothed enthusiasm is still endearing. For all his disruptive behavior, he shows not a trace of malice, and it’ll be easy for readers to want to encourage his further exploits. (Picture book. 5-7)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-48087-1
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Themes of freedom and responsibility twine between the lines of this short but heavy novel from the author of Because of Winn-Dixie (2000). Three months after his mother's death, Rob and his father are living in a small-town Florida motel, each nursing sharp, private pain. On the same day Rob has two astonishing encounters: first, he stumbles upon a caged tiger in the woods behind the motel; then he meets Sistine, a new classmate responding to her parents' breakup with ready fists and a big chip on her shoulder. About to burst with his secret, Rob confides in Sistine, who instantly declares that the tiger must be freed. As Rob quickly develops a yen for Sistine's company that gives her plenty of emotional leverage, and the keys to the cage almost literally drop into his hands, credible plotting plainly takes a back seat to character delineation here. And both struggle for visibility beneath a wagonload of symbol and metaphor: the real tiger (and the inevitable recitation of Blake's poem); the cage; Rob's dream of Sistine riding away on the beast's back; a mysterious skin condition on Rob's legs that develops after his mother's death; a series of wooden figurines that he whittles; a larger-than-life African-American housekeeper at the motel who dispenses wisdom with nearly every utterance; and the climax itself, which is signaled from the start. It's all so freighted with layers of significance that, like Lois Lowry's Gathering Blue (2000), Anne Mazer's Oxboy (1995), or, further back, Julia Cunningham's Dorp Dead (1965), it becomes more an exercise in analysis than a living, breathing story. Still, the tiger, "burning bright" with magnificent, feral presence, does make an arresting central image. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7636-0911-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK TO SCREEN
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