If it’s more common for girls in literature to be great readers and poor math students, then 13-year-old Hannah is certainly different. She can’t read but she has an incredible facility for numbers and for mathematical processes. Home for this Depression-era girl is a dairy farm in Pennsylvania and school is a one-room building in need of repairs. When rich Mrs. Sweet comes from the Mayor’s Education Reform Board in Philadelphia, she offers Hannah an extraordinary opportunity: Hannah can live with Mrs. Sweet, attend a fancy private school, and take a test for a math scholarship to a fancy college. The conflict, not unexpectedly, is poor vs. rich and farm vs. town. Hannah’s parents reluctantly give her permission, perhaps in recognition that Hannah has received her talents from her grandfather. However, Hannah’s snobby new classmates look down on her. Only another of Mrs. Sweet’s charges, a boy with a talent for memorization, befriends Hannah and helps her learn to read by using newspaper accounts of gangsters as practice material. When her big math test is 20 days away, Hannah notes that 20/20 is perfect vision and calcium is 20 on the Periodic Table, automatically seeing patterns and sequences in numbers. Working with numbers is rational and real: “The answer was always waiting and perfect and standing alone.” Her conflict with her farming background builds when she returns home for her grandfather’s funeral. Hannah fails the big test but gains from the experience, realizing that she can still pursue her dream of studying mathematics. It will always be there for her and she will “go anywhere for it.” Hannah’s adoration of numbers and formulas borders on the obsessive and the positive conclusion seems somewhat at odds with the Depression-era setting, but she is a different and rarely seen role model. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7868-0879-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
Charming, poignant, and thoughtfully woven.
An aspiring scientist and a budding artist become friends and help each other with dream projects.
Unfolding in mid-1980s Sacramento, California, this story stars 12-year-olds Rosalind and Benjamin as first-person narrators in alternating chapters. Ro’s father, a fellow space buff, was killed by a drunk driver; the rocket they were working on together lies unfinished in her closet. As for Benji, not only has his best friend, Amir, moved away, but the comic book holding the clue for locating his dad is also missing. Along with their profound personal losses, the protagonists share a fixation with the universe’s intriguing potential: Ro decides to complete the rocket and hopes to launch mementos of her father into outer space while Benji’s conviction that aliens and UFOs are real compels his imagination and creativity as an artist. An accident in science class triggers a chain of events forcing Benji and Ro, who is new to the school, to interact and unintentionally learn each other’s secrets. They resolve to find Benji’s dad—a famous comic-book artist—and partner to finish Ro’s rocket for the science fair. Together, they overcome technical, scheduling, and geographical challenges. Readers will be drawn in by amusing and fantastical elements in the comic book theme, high emotional stakes that arouse sympathy, and well-drawn character development as the protagonists navigate life lessons around grief, patience, self-advocacy, and standing up for others. Ro is biracial (Chinese/White); Benji is White.
Charming, poignant, and thoughtfully woven. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-06-300888-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit...
The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction (Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction—a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.
Five years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her; the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter; later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here; like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events—but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 1, 1989
ISBN: 0547577095
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
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