by Ann E. Burg ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 6, 2020
Moving, though more about the disaster itself than its human cost.
In first-person free verse, Johnstown, Pennsylvania, residents comment on their lives and dreams before and after the catastrophic flood of 1889.
The six main voices in the cast are younger than those in Jame Richards’ similarly versified account, Three Rivers Rising (2010)—at least until the aftermath, when Andrew Carnegie and other members of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, two survivors who unsuccessfully sued them for damages, Red Cross founder Clara Barton, and, most poignantly, unidentified (but perhaps previously met) victims chime in. Burg invents some characters, but everyone given a first and last name is historical, and she takes such pains to describe the flood’s direct causes and actual events in the poems that her appended note seems superfluous. The expressed feelings and words are all her own, though, and if most of the speakers sound more like mouthpieces than distinct individuals, both the intensity of the tragedy and a sense of outrage that the negligent parties escaped punishment come through clearly. Except for the personified river’s contributions, which are nature notes cast into solemn, italicized streams of one- to three-word lines, everyone’s mildly elevated language and cadence sound so much alike that without the identifying labels it’s hard to tell one from another. Still, readers will come away with a clear idea of the flood’s causes, perpetrators, and shocking toll. An absence of descriptors points to a White default.
Moving, though more about the disaster itself than its human cost. (Verse historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-54069-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
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by Gordon Korman ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 28, 2022
A terrific premise buried beneath problem-novel tropes.
A gaggle of eighth graders find the coolest clubhouse ever.
Fulfilling the fantasies of anyone who’s ever constructed a fort in their bedroom or elsewhere, Korman hands his five middle schoolers a fully stocked bomb shelter constructed decades ago in the local woods by an eccentric tycoon and lost until a hurricane exposes the entrance. So, how to keep the hideout secret from interfering grown-ups—and, more particularly, from scary teen psychopath Jaeger Devlin? The challenge is tougher still when everyone in the central cast is saddled with something: C.J. struggles to hide injuries inflicted by the unstable stepdad his likewise abused mother persists in enabling; Jason is both caught in the middle of a vicious divorce and unable to stand up to his controlling girlfriend; Evan is not only abandoned by drug-abusing parents, but sees his big brother going to the bad thanks to Jaeger’s influence; Mitchell struggles with OCD–fueled anxieties and superstitions; and so forth. How to keep a story overtaxed with issues and conflicts from turning into a dreary slog? Spoiler alert: Neither the author nor his characters ultimately prove equal to the challenge. With the possible exception of Ricky Molina, one of the multiple narrators, everyone seems to be White.
A terrific premise buried beneath problem-novel tropes. (resources, author’s note) (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: June 28, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-62914-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2022
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by Katherine Rundell ; illustrated by Charles Santoso ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 27, 2019
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure
A Prohibition-era child enlists a gifted pickpocket and a pair of budding circus performers in a clever ruse to save her ancestral home from being stolen by developers.
Rundell sets her iron-jawed protagonist on a seemingly impossible quest: to break into the ramshackle Hudson River castle from which her grieving grandfather has been abruptly evicted by unscrupulous con man Victor Sorrotore and recover a fabulously valuable hidden emerald. Laying out an elaborate scheme in a notebook that itself turns out to be an integral part of the ensuing caper, Vita, only slowed by a bout with polio years before, enlists a team of helpers. Silk, a light-fingered orphan, aspiring aerialist Samuel Kawadza, and Arkady, a Russian lad with a remarkable affinity for and with animals, all join her in a series of expeditions, mostly nocturnal, through and under Manhattan. The city never comes to life the way the human characters do (Vita, for instance, “had six kinds of smile, and five of them were real”) but often does have a tangible presence, and notwithstanding Vita’s encounter with a (rather anachronistically styled) “Latina” librarian, period attitudes toward race and class are convincingly drawn. Vita, Silk, and Arkady all present white; Samuel, a Shona immigrant from Southern Rhodesia, is the only primary character of color. Santoso’s vignettes of, mostly, animals and small items add occasional visual grace notes.
Narrow squeaks aplenty combine with bursts of lyrical prose for a satisfying adventure . (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1948-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
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