“I wonder if there’s a place for my story in your world,” writes Nopi. Stories like this at least help to ensure that there...
Despite the flip title, a harsh picture of civil war in Liberia as seen through the eyes of two children.
Marked by sudden violence and a pervasive sense of uncertainty, the alternating accounts of Nopi, 10 at the beginning, and her little brother Lucky, take both children through eight years of brutal treatment as the two are snatched out of school by soldiers and forced to fight. Ultimately the two survive, scarred by their experiences (and left deaf from a beating, in Nopi’s case) but perhaps not permanently damaged, and they are joyfully reunited with their parents. De Graaf bases her episodic, present-tense narratives on interviews with Liberian children and adds an informational appendix with photos that not only lays out Liberia’s troubled history (up to 2006, when the original Dutch edition of the book was published) but also includes upbeat drawings and letters from young survivors.
“I wonder if there’s a place for my story in your world,” writes Nopi. Stories like this at least help to ensure that there are. (map, websites) (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8028-5406-3
Page Count: 125
Publisher: Eerdmans
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
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
Clear of stance and cogent of theme.
Tensions rise when a cadre of Hitler Youth arrives in a young student’s Bavarian town.
“They stood out like skunks in their brown shirts, black pants, and jackboots.” Rolf is upset to see the deteriorating relationship between his always-angry older brother, Romer, and their widowed father. But he’s more disturbed by evidence that Romer is drifting toward sinister, spiderlike Hans and the squad of uniformed thugs behind him—particularly after the distribution of recruitment leaflets is followed by arson and the beating of a local Jewish merchant as bystanders watch…some approvingly. Matters come to a head when Hitler speaks at a mass rally; Rolf comes away from the experience firm in his conviction that the Nazi takeover must be resisted. This fast-moving, stirring tale is set in 1929, but along with a timeline that begins with Hitler’s birth and ends in 1935, the author intersperses helpful flashbacks about the end of the First World War, the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch, and other events presented as news stories. He also makes explicit the book’s cautionary purpose: “It’s common for us who live in democracies around the world to say, ‘it can’t happen here,’” he writes in his afterword. “It can.”
Clear of stance and cogent of theme. (glossary) (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781665947206
Page Count: 160
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
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