An excellent children’s novel featuring a captivating, charming young girl.
In Liss-Levinson’s (Cookie the Seder Cat, 2011, etc.) fine children’s book, a girl and her family are forced to flee their home to escape Hurricane Katrina.
Gertie, a 9-year-old Jewish girl growing up in New Orleans, loves to eat cookies and sponge cake with her brother Jonah at parties at the synagogue; on Wednesdays, she visits her Grandma Rose at a nursing home and calls out numbers for the bingo game. But when Katrina heads toward the city, Gertie and her family must evacuate. Gertie’s mother instructs her to pack up enough clothes, books and toys for a two-day stay at her aunt’s house in Memphis, Tenn., until the storm passes. Once there, Gertie feels safe but worries about her grandmother, her house, her friends and her father—a dedicated doctor who stays behind to help. Due to the overwhelming disaster, the two-day stay stretches into weeks, and Gertie finds herself having to attend a new Jewish school and make new friends. Much of the book’s success lies in Gertie’s memorable first-person voice. As Gertie relates her struggle to adapt to her new life—and then to return to her old, but substantially altered one—the reader witnesses a character’s slow, beautiful evolution. Gertie learns to compromise, to feel gratitude for the little things and to help those less fortunate than she is. The author manages to capture Gertie’s endearing naïveté as well as her adeptness in making connections and thoughtful choices. Wonderful stories abound; Gertie questions why God didn’t uphold his promise to Noah never to bring another ruinous flood to Earth and, in another scene, holds a burial for her broken Barbie doll in the backyard. When Gertie attempts to surprise her family by concocting a noodle-pudding recipe for Rosh Hashana (with leftover spaghetti and hard-boiled eggs), her brother complains, and she comments, “Jonah, you don’t know any better, because you are only a five year old chef. And I am almost ten. So I have better taste than you. Now and forever. So there. And Happy New Year to you too.” The author includes a helpful glossary of pertinent Jewish terminology and a list of addresses for donating books to organizations throughout the world.
An excellent children’s novel featuring a captivating, charming young girl.Pub Date: April 12, 2012
ISBN: 978-1470082536
Page Count: 138
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Continuing to find inspiration in the work of Virginia Lee Burton, Munro Leaf and other illustrators of the past, Long (The Little Engine That Could, 2005) offers an aw-shucks friendship tale that features a small but hardworking tractor (“putt puff puttedy chuff”) with a Little Toot–style face and a big-eared young descendant of Ferdinand the bull who gets stuck in deep, gooey mud. After the big new yellow tractor, crowds of overalls-clad locals and a red fire engine all fail to pull her out, the little tractor (who had been left behind the barn to rust after the arrival of the new tractor) comes putt-puff-puttedy-chuff-ing down the hill to entice his terrified bovine buddy successfully back to dry ground. Short on internal logic but long on creamy scenes of calf and tractor either gamboling energetically with a gaggle of McCloskey-like geese through neutral-toned fields or resting peacefully in the shade of a gnarled tree (apple, not cork), the episode will certainly draw nostalgic adults. Considering the author’s track record and influences, it may find a welcome from younger audiences too. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-25248-8
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2009
SEEN & HEARD
This outing lacks the sophistication of such category standards as Clementine; here’s hoping English amps things up for...
A gentle voice and familiar pitfalls characterize this tale of a boy navigating the risky road to responsibility.
Gavin is new to his neighborhood and Carver Elementary. He likes his new friend, Richard, and has a typically contentious relationship with his older sister, Danielle. When Gavin’s desire to impress Richard sets off a disastrous chain of events, the boy struggles to evade responsibility for his actions. “After all, it isn’t his fault that Danielle’s snow globe got broken. Sure, he shouldn’t have been in her room—but then, she shouldn’t be keeping candy in her room to tempt him. Anybody would be tempted. Anybody!” opines Gavin once he learns the punishment for his crime. While Gavin has a charming Everyboy quality, and his aversion to Aunt Myrtle’s yapping little dog rings true, little about Gavin distinguishes him from other trouble-prone protagonists. He is, regrettably, forgettable. Coretta Scott King Honor winner English (Francie, 1999) is a teacher whose storytelling usually benefits from her day job. Unfortunately, the pizzazz of classroom chaos is largely absent from this series opener.
This outing lacks the sophistication of such category standards as Clementine; here’s hoping English amps things up for subsequent volumes. (Fiction. 6-9)Pub Date: Dec. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-547-97044-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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