An uplifting and heartwarming novel that celebrates family and heritage.
During World War II, a 13-year-old girl who always tries to keep the peace within her family discovers her Indigenous cultural roots and long-suppressed family secrets.
Rosemary and her two younger brothers have been scattered across England for the past three years while their parents have sought stable employment. Rosemary has lived in London with critical Aunt Katie and Uncle John, who have little good to say about Rosemary’s American father. Given the imminent threat of Germany’s Luftwaffe bombing campaign, Dad, who’s a veteran of the Great War, decides to reunite the family. They’ll sail for America to stay with his estranged mother in Wisconsin. Grandmother Charlotte, whose mother was “a full-blooded Ojibwe woman” and father was from Scotland, introduces the children to Anishinaabemowin vocabulary and Ojibwe ways. Her grandmother proposes a private bargain to Rosemary: If she helps with her garden so she can win at the county fair, she’ll lease Dad some land to build a home where the family can remain together, as Rosemary has long dreamed. The well-drawn rustic Wisconsin wilderness setting is enriched by the introduction of Anishinaabemowin terms for local flora, supplemented by a glossary. Johnson’s novel sensitively unpacks the generational trauma of injustices and discrimination against Native peoples both in the U.S. and abroad. Rosemary and her father’s side of the family are, like the author, of Indigenous and European descent.
An uplifting and heartwarming novel that celebrates family and heritage. (map, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 9-14)Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780823458530
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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