Provocative yet cautious.
A community transformed by swastikas, and the response.
Chokecherry, Colorado, is a small town with a lot going on. A group of paleontologists from Massachusetts have set up a research station after fossilized dinosaur poop is discovered in the area. Some residents still whisper about the Night of a Thousand Flames in 1978, when Ku Klux Klan members flocked to the area and burned crosses. And the local media is sent into an uproar when Michael Amorosa, a Dominican boy and one of the few students of color, discovers a swastika painted on a wall at Chokecherry Middle School. Told in alternating perspectives, the story follows the students as they embark on a lengthy tolerance-building curriculum, come up with an art project to commemorate Jewish victims of the Holocaust, deal with an out-of-town YouTuber who wants to go viral with his commentary on the story, and learn more about themselves and their family histories. The only Jewish girl, Dana Levinson, helps Lincoln Rowley study for his bar mitzvah after he learns that his maternal grandmother, rescued and raised by nuns as a Christian, was the sole member of her family to survive the Holocaust. While the story is engaging, with many twists and turns, the different voices blend together, and emotional depth takes a back seat to educational goals. There’s a lot to ponder here about mistakes, intention, the difference between ignorance and hatred, and religious identity.
Provocative yet cautious. (author's note) (Fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-62911-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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BOOK TO SCREEN
A beautiful, moving mythological adventure.
In a world based on Greek mythology, a 12-year-old aspires to be a Ferryer of the dead but gets off track when she meets a Living girl who’s found her way into the Underworld.
All Senka knows is her existence on an island in the middle of the Acheron River, “smack between the realm of the Living and the realm of the Dead,” where she’s the ward of Charon, the Ferryer of souls. Her teacher is an enormous raven named Mortimer. After Senka, who presents white, learns the Rules for Ferryers, Charon agrees to her repeated requests and starts training her to become a Ferryer. But when an emergency leads to Senka’s being left alone, she disobeys Charon’s explicit orders, takes the boat out on her own—and quickly learns that ferrying souls is far more complicated than she realized. She encounters dark-haired, brown-skinned Poppy, whose “edges are crisp”—she’s a Living girl who will sacrifice anything to find Joey, her younger brother who died. As Senka tries to convince Poppy to return to the Shore of the Living, the two get stuck in the Underwild, a “lawless place where chaos reigns” that’s filled with innumerable dangers and shrouded in secrets. Senka’s lively first-person narration relates the unexpected friendship that forms through her shared adventures with Poppy as they face mortality and the unknown. Debut author Targosz offers readers a meaningful exploration of grief and its impact on those left behind.
A beautiful, moving mythological adventure. (Fantasy. 9-13)Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781665957632
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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