REBEL ON A ROCK

by Nina Bawden ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 1978

Readers of Carrie's War (1973) will be predisposed to follow the adventures of Carrie's daughter Jo, whose new stepfather Albert Sandwich (remember Albert?) takes the family vacationing in a lovely country currently suffering under dictatorship. Jo is flattered at the start when Albert involves her in his touchy mission of delivering smuggled messages to citizens of Ithaca; later, though, she's outraged when he seems to go along with hotel guest Herr Schmidt's approval of the regime. But Jo eventually learns what Albert had guessed all along--that Herr Schmidt is in reality the exiled leader Platonides, and the father of a boy her age with whom Jo had become friendly. Jo begins her first-person story by announcing that ""When I was twelve I stopped a war""; in the end you see that this less-than-heroic feat is accomplished when she inadvertently reveals the would-be revolutionary's identity to the dreaded, torturing regime. But Jo no sooner makes that revelation than she reports that Platonides will only be kept under house arrest for two years, when a new revolt will bring him to democratic power. It's a disappointingly easy resolution, and the visiting exile's behavior is sometimes hard to credit. A smaller story then, for a smaller war; but Bawden's keen and sympathetic sense of happy-family abrasions and pre-adolescent anxieties brings Jo and her problems very close to home.

Pub Date: March 10, 1978

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1978

Categories: FICTION