A fierce portrait of a young man’s discovery of power through words.
This verse novel presents a fictionalized account of a real historical figure who used the power of words to help end forced labor in 19th-century Cuba.
Antonio Chuffat is a free-born Chinese-African young man who comes of age in Cuba during a time of turmoil. Indentured laborers from China and African slaves are suffering dehumanizing injustice. Rebels have been fighting against Spanish rule for years. Thousands of Chinese-American refugees are migrating to Cuba, fleeing anti-Asian violence in California. Antonio’s adolescence is spent working as a courier, delivering messages that travel between Spanish and Chinese businessmen, military leaders, and diplomats. Observing the violence and seeking a way to contribute to the battle for justice, he comes to realize that true power can be found in words, and so he helps to tell the stories of the powerless. Fictional twins Wing and Fan, Chinese-American refugees, also help tell the story. Over the course of seven years, these three main characters each find their own ways to contribute to the freedom efforts. As with Engle’s related verse novels, this work looks directly at the brutality of slavery and war. It also tenderly exposes the rage and hope that can exist within the same heart.
A fierce portrait of a young man’s discovery of power through words. (historical background, historical note, references, further reading) (Historical verse/fiction. 11-16)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-6112-2
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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
Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch.
A Jewish girl joins up with Polish resistance groups to fight for her people against the evils of the Holocaust.
Chaya Lindner is forcibly separated from her family when they are consigned to the Jewish ghetto in Krakow. The 16-year-old is taken in by the leaders of Akiva, a fledgling Jewish resistance group that offers her the opportunity to become a courier, using her fair coloring to pass for Polish and sneak into ghettos to smuggle in supplies and information. Chaya’s missions quickly become more dangerous, taking her on a perilous journey from a disastrous mission in Krakow to the ghastly ghetto of Lodz and eventually to Warsaw to aid the Jews there in their gathering uprising inside the walls of the ghetto. Through it all, she is partnered with a secretive young girl whom she is reluctant to trust. The trajectory of the narrative skews toward the sensational, highlighting moments of resistance via cinematic action sequences but not pausing to linger on the emotional toll of the Holocaust’s atrocities. Younger readers without sufficient historical knowledge may not appreciate the gravity of the events depicted. The principal characters lack depth, and their actions and the situations they find themselves in often require too much suspension of disbelief to pass for realism.
Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch. (afterword) (Historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-338-14847-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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