A sweet mother-daughter tale.
Betty, just turning 15, lost her mother to cancer when she was a toddler. Now she thinks she’s in love for the first time. Can she still get advice from Mum?
When she sees pale-skinned, black-haired Toby for the first time, blonde, blue-eyed Betty has an immediate physical reaction. Toby might be the most handsome boy she’s ever seen. When Toby takes an interest in her, even calling her his girlfriend, Betty needs advice. On every birthday her dad has given her a letter that her mother wrote to her, but this year’s is the last letter. But in it, her mum writes that she has hidden more letters in the attic, and these specifically talk about her first experience of falling in love. It turns out that her mum had an experience quite similar to Betty’s when she was the same age. Meanwhile, as Betty gets to know Toby better, she begins to see another side to him. Betty will find love in this story, but from whom? Set in England (with a lightly Americanized text), the story shows little evidence of its racial and cultural diversity. McLachlan creates a lovely coming-of-age experience for Betty as she learns about love and also about the mother she cannot remember but whose love she also craves. The story drops clues about Toby’s less-than-stellar character that allow readers to discover his flaws before Betty does.
A sweet mother-daughter tale. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-06149-2
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
In Nina's world, children have GPS trackers until they turn 18, and surveillance satellites monitor for subversive talk. Tight control stands between young women and a threatening sexuality; at 16, teenage girls get tattooed with their age and become fair game. Fifteen-year-old Nina, unlike her friends, dreads becoming “sex-teen.” Her life is too confusing without extra complications: Her mother's just died, and Nina's half sister Dee might be legally claimed by her father to be a servant—or worse. How does the cute boy who might be a member of the resistance fit into Nina's life? And had Nina's mother been part of the resistance herself? Nina doesn't want to get involved, but she needs to protect Dee. A large suspension of disbelief is required for the dysfunctional gender politics. (How did the situation get so broken? How do teenage boys and girls manage to be friends when they're only weeks or months away from effectively legal rape?) Otherwise, a fun little thriller for the abstinence romantics. (Science fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-14-241771-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Speak/Penguin
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
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