Set in 1878, Rinaldi’s latest work of historical fiction is at once enlightening and highly engrossing. After the untimely death of her mother, Lizzy’s father leaves her in Santa Fe at a convent school. With a healthy sense of irony, Lizzy often finds the convent ways absurd. While many of the girls seek visions of the Virgin Mary, Lizzy is a nonbeliever and without affectation. The girls ostracize her, so she finds friendship with an odd assortment of people, including a homeless, old carpenter in need of food and shelter. Lizzy convinces the Bishop to hire the carpenter to build a badly needed staircase for the new choir loft. The other students resent the carpenter, however, as they await the appearance of a staircase through a miracle of St. Joseph. As the wait lengthens and tempers flare, Lizzy’s roommate and nemesis cruelly blinds Lizzy’s kitten. The carpenter offers many words of gentle comfort to Lizzy and soothes her wounded kitten. The carpenter is finally permitted to finish his work, and the kitten, against odds, regains its sight. The entire town is awestruck by the incomparable beauty of the spiral staircase, but the carpenter vanishes without even collecting his pay. Lizzy is never converted to Catholicism, but she and the reader are left to ponder the nature of miracles and human kindness. It is a pleasure to accompany Lizzy throughout this tale thrumming with mini-adventures and vivid characters. (author’s note, bibliography) (Historical fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-15-202430-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
Namioka (Den of the White Fox, 1997, etc.) offers readers a glimpse of the ritual of foot-binding, and a surprising heroine whose life is determined by her rejection of that ritual. Ailin is spirited—her family thinks uncontrollable—even at age five, in her family’s compound in China in 1911, she doesn’t want to have her feet bound, especially after Second Sister shows Ailin her own bound feet and tells her how much it hurts. Ailin can see already how bound feet will restrict her movements, and prevent her from running and playing. Her father takes the revolutionary step of permitting her to leave her feet alone, even though the family of Ailin’s betrothed then breaks off the engagement. Ailin goes to the missionary school and learns English; when her father dies and her uncle cuts off funds for tuition, she leaves her family to become a nanny for an American missionary couple’s children. She learns all the daily household chores that were done by servants in her own home, and finds herself, painfully, cut off from her own culture and separate from the Americans. At 16, she decides to go with the missionaries when they return to San Francisco, where she meets and marries another Chinese immigrant who starts his own restaurant. The metaphor of things bound and unbound is a ribbon winding through this vivid narrative; the story moves swiftly, while Ailin is a brave and engaging heroine whose difficult choices reflect her time and her gender. (Fiction. 9-14)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-32666-1
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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