The touching wartime account of a separated family and their joyful reunion.
A girl worries about her father and pet bird, trapped by war, in this touching debut picture book by Kuburovic, based on her own experiences as a child in Sarajevo.
When Sasha was a little girl staying at her grandmother’s house, she bought a small, blue budgie, even though she knew her father didn’t want a pet bird in the house. But after her father sees the bird, he relents, and Riki becomes part of their family. The pet bird learns to speak a few phrases, watches television with Sasha’s parents, and even waits on a chair in Sasha’s room for her to wake up every morning. But budgies don’t live as long as humans, and when Sasha is a teenager, Riki gets sick and dies. The family misses him so much that Sasha’s father buys her a new budgie, whom they name after the first one. Sasha has to leave home to go to college, and soon war breaks out in her hometown of Sarajevo. Although Sasha and her mother are able to escape to Valjevo with Sasha’s grandmother, Riki and Sasha’s father are stuck in Sarajevo. Sasha sends care packages of food and seed to her father, who, for two years, successfully keeps Riki alive despite cruel winters with no heat or electricity. When they are finally able to leave the city, Riki becomes one of the only pets—and almost certainly the only budgie!—to survive the war. Brightly colored illustrations bring Sasha and the budgies to life, although the major difference between Sasha as a small girl and Sasha as she grows older is the length of her hair (she wears it shorter as a college student). Kuburovic tells her story in a matter-of-fact tone, neither romanticizing nor downplaying the struggles of those stuck in Sarajevo during the war years. While the story is about the birds, children may well become interested in knowing more about Sasha’s home country and the war that kept her apart from her father. Children interested in history, especially independent readers in upper elementary school, will find that these elements provide an entry point that makes it easy to identify with the larger story.
The touching wartime account of a separated family and their joyful reunion.Pub Date: June 19, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-46-026200-9
Page Count: 32
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 6, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
The seemingly ageless Seeger brings back his renowned giant for another go in a tuneful tale that, like the art, is a bit sketchy, but chockful of worthy messages. Faced with yearly floods and droughts since they’ve cut down all their trees, the townsfolk decide to build a dam—but the project is stymied by a boulder that is too huge to move. Call on Abiyoyo, suggests the granddaughter of the man with the magic wand, then just “Zoop Zoop” him away again. But the rock that Abiyoyo obligingly flings aside smashes the wand. How to avoid Abiyoyo’s destruction now? Sing the monster to sleep, then make it a peaceful, tree-planting member of the community, of course. Seeger sums it up in a postscript: “every community must learn to manage its giants.” Hays, who illustrated the original (1986), creates colorful, if unfinished-looking, scenes featuring a notably multicultural human cast and a towering Cubist fantasy of a giant. The song, based on a Xhosa lullaby, still has that hard-to-resist sing-along potential, and the themes of waging peace, collective action, and the benefits of sound ecological practices are presented in ways that children will both appreciate and enjoy. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-689-83271-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
Not for the faint-hearted—who are mostly adults anyway—but for stouthearted kids who love a brush with the sinister:...
A magnificently creepy fantasy pits a bright, bored little girl against a soul-eating horror that inhabits the reality right next door.
Coraline’s parents are loving, but really too busy to play with her, so she amuses herself by exploring her family’s new flat. A drawing-room door that opens onto a brick wall becomes a natural magnet for the curious little girl, and she is only half-surprised when, one day, the door opens onto a hallway and Coraline finds herself in a skewed mirror of her own flat, complete with skewed, button-eyed versions of her own parents. This is Gaiman’s (American Gods, 2001, etc.) first novel for children, and the author of the Sandman graphic novels here shows a sure sense of a child’s fears—and the child’s ability to overcome those fears. “I will be brave,” thinks Coraline. “No, I am brave.” When Coraline realizes that her other mother has not only stolen her real parents but has also stolen the souls of other children before her, she resolves to free her parents and to find the lost souls by matching her wits against the not-mother. The narrative hews closely to a child’s-eye perspective: Coraline never really tries to understand what has happened or to fathom the nature of the other mother; she simply focuses on getting her parents back and thwarting the other mother for good. Her ability to accept and cope with the surreality of the other flat springs from the child’s ability to accept, without question, the eccentricity and arbitrariness of her own—and every child’s own—reality. As Coraline’s quest picks up its pace, the parallel world she finds herself trapped in grows ever more monstrous, generating some deliciously eerie descriptive writing.
Not for the faint-hearted—who are mostly adults anyway—but for stouthearted kids who love a brush with the sinister: Coraline is spot on. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-380-97778-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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