The plot begs connection to Antony John's richer Five Flavors of Dumb (2010); though Ali and Jace are likable, readers...
An abused, totally deaf teen runs away with a rock band.
There’s just four months until her 18th birthday; can she make it? Ali had been a classical musician, a child prodigy who performed at Carnegie Hall, until the white girl lost both her hearing and her mother in one fell swoop. It's been seven years since her world ended and she came to live with her alcoholic, physically abusive father. All she wants is to escape and go to Gallaudet, where she can actually join a Deaf community and meet others with hearing loss, but her dad is violently opposed. She wins the chance to meet her bestie's biggest crush, Jace Beckett, "total jerk" rocker, and is underwhelmed despite her physical attraction to the attractive, ripped, white 19-year-old. Jace's poor crumpled heart grows three sizes when Ali evokes memories of his own abusive upbringing as the child of mentally ill addicts. Perhaps, though he's "broken," Ali will be able to "fix him." Jace and Ali share the narration in first-person, present-tense chapters. Neither the presentation of deafness nor of abuse is entirely convincing, and the ending is too tidy for belief. Ali's ASL is phenomenal for someone who's only ever signed with hearing tutors and one hearing friend, while her lip reading is near magical.
The plot begs connection to Antony John's richer Five Flavors of Dumb (2010); though Ali and Jace are likable, readers interested in Deafness and rock-’n’-roll are better served by the earlier book . (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: May 3, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-63450-707-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Sky Pony Press
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2016
Well-educated American boys from privileged families have abundant options for college and career. For Chiko, their Burmese counterpart, there are no good choices. There is never enough to eat, and his family lives in constant fear of the military regime that has imprisoned Chiko’s physician father. Soon Chiko is commandeered by the army, trained to hunt down members of the Karenni ethnic minority. Tai, another “recruit,” uses his streetwise survival skills to help them both survive. Meanwhile, Tu Reh, a Karenni youth whose village was torched by the Burmese Army, has been chosen for his first military mission in his people’s resistance movement. How the boys meet and what comes of it is the crux of this multi-voiced novel. While Perkins doesn’t sugarcoat her subject—coming of age in a brutal, fascistic society—this is a gentle story with a lot of heart, suitable for younger readers than the subject matter might suggest. It answers the question, “What is it like to be a child soldier?” clearly, but with hope. (author’s note, historical note) (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58089-328-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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
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