A lively, engaging tale with relatable tween concerns and themes of friendship and self-worth.
Unexpected friendships help a tween reclaim her creativity in this middle-grade novel set in contemporary Shanghai.
Tackling sixth grade math and living up to parental academic expectations are bad enough, but for almost-12-year-old Xu Haiqing, there are worse problems. She feels estranged from her best friend, Xia Luolan, who left Shanghai to move with her family to Massachusetts. And the tween feels sad and guilty that since her beloved Laoye (grandfather), a master Chinese calligrapher, died, she has not practiced the art herself. Movingly, calligraphy had been a bond between them from the time she picked up a brush at age 3. When Haiqing is encouraged by friends to attend a Chinese calligraphy class, her parents say no. Making art has no place on the path her career-driven mother has mapped out for her daughter’s academic and corporate success. How can Haiqing reclaim “the person I was two years ago and make Laoye proud”? This energetic and relatable first-person narrative is written with an observant eye for time and place in the everyday life of a Chinese tween wrestling with peer relationships, strict parents, dictatorial teachers, academic pressures, and dreams and challenges that seem hopeless. The deft narrative weave does loosen somewhat when portraying Haiqing’s efforts to help a young violinist with stage fright. Intended to propel Haiqing to find her own confidence and her way back to her art—and to mend her friendship with Luolan—this overly involved subplot (secret meetings, eavesdropping, text exchanges, a hidden recording attempt) takes center stage for too long. It’s difficult, too, to attribute sincerity to the instigator of these clandestine meetings and actions, a boy who stabs classmates’ arms with a freshly sharpened pencil as a joke. But despite these missteps, Shao knows whereof she writes. She’s a middle schooler and, like Luolan, a transplant from Shanghai to Massachusetts. The author’s first novel, The Xia Stories: Once in a Lifetime (2019), about Luolan adjusting to life in the United States, was published when she was 10. A sprinkling of Mandarin words is explained in the text and in a glossary.
A lively, engaging tale with relatable tween concerns and themes of friendship and self-worth.Pub Date: April 30, 2021
ISBN: 979-8-7428-5522-4
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
It’s 1949, and 13-year-old Francine Green lives in “the land of ‘Sit down, Francine’ and ‘Be quiet, Francine’ ” at All Saints School for Girls in Los Angeles. When she meets Sophie Bowman and her father, she’s encouraged to think about issues in the news: the atomic bomb, peace, communism and blacklisting. This is not a story about the McCarthy era so much as one about how one girl—who has been trained to be quiet and obedient by her school, family, church and culture—learns to speak up for herself. Cushman offers a fine sense of the times with such cultural references as President Truman, Hopalong Cassidy, Montgomery Clift, Lucky Strike, “duck and cover” and the Iron Curtain. The dialogue is sharp, carrying a good part of this story of friends and foes, guilt and courage—a story that ought to send readers off to find out more about McCarthy, his witch-hunt and the First Amendment. Though not a happily-ever-after tale, it dramatizes how one person can stand up to unfairness, be it in front of Senate hearings or in the classroom. (author’s note) (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-50455-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
At the end of the term, a new student who is black and Vietnamese finds a morsel of hope that she too will find a place in...
This is almost like a play for 18 voices, as Grimes (Stepping Out with Grandma Mac, not reviewed, etc.) moves her narration among a group of high school students in the Bronx.
The English teacher, Mr. Ward, accepts a set of poems from Wesley, his response to a month of reading poetry from the Harlem Renaissance. Soon there’s an open-mike poetry reading, sponsored by Mr. Ward, every month, and then later, every week. The chapters in the students’ voices alternate with the poems read by that student, defiant, shy, terrified. All of them, black, Latino, white, male, and female, talk about the unease and alienation endemic to their ages, and they do it in fresh and appealing voices. Among them: Janelle, who is tired of being called fat; Leslie, who finds friendship in another who has lost her mom; Diondra, who hides her art from her father; Tyrone, who has faith in words and in his “moms”; Devon, whose love for books and jazz gets jeers. Beyond those capsules are rich and complex teens, and their tentative reaching out to each other increases as through the poems they also find more of themselves. Steve writes: “But hey! Joy / is not a crime, though / some people / make it seem so.”
At the end of the term, a new student who is black and Vietnamese finds a morsel of hope that she too will find a place in the poetry. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8037-2569-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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