An entertaining coming-of-age tale with a likable young hero.
This debut children’s book follows the 19th-century adventures of a boy and his family on an Illinois farm.
On a midsummer day in 1941, 75-year-old Bucknell “Bucky” McGuire sits on the porch with his great-grandchildren and relates tales of his youth, beginning when his family traveled west by covered wagon from Elizabeth, Ohio, to Galena, Illinois, in 1877. His parents, Dylan and Rosie, are taking Bucky, 11, and his siblings, George, 3, and Melissa, 4, to Longhollow Farm, where Rosie’s brother, Connor Hanrahan, has a house and farm waiting for them. Disliking agricultural life, Connor has set up a blacksmithing shop. The McGuires’ new house is well equipped and they have 90 tillable acres, but in the next year, drought and a grasshopper plague utterly destroy the first crop. To help make ends meet, Bucky gets a job at a cattle ranch, which turns out to be a close-knit, familylike operation. Bucky learns valuable skills and does some significant growing up during his stay. As the McGuires’ fortunes improve and time goes on, Bucky’s escapades include helping to rescue some heedless friends from an abandoned lead mine and daring to court the girl he likes. In his novel, Foy draws on family memories for Bucky’s story, which is enlivened by entertaining details of 19th-century life. The vivid ranch depictions are especially intriguing—not just riding horses or roping cattle, but also making camp coffee, repairing fences, and telling tall tales. Exciting exploits add spice to the story’s overall moral foundation: recognizing the importance of bonds with family and friends, living up to your responsibilities, and gaining wisdom. But the book could have more honestly tackled the troubling link between Midwestern settlement and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples, characterized here as raiders.
An entertaining coming-of-age tale with a likable young hero. (Children's historical fiction, 12+)Pub Date: Aug. 24, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-578-86582-9
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Longhollow Books
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
This historical debut speaks volumes of love and longing.
During World War II, Manami and her parents and grandfather are forced to relocate from Bainbridge Island in Washington to Manzanar, an internment camp in California for Japanese-Americans.
As they’re about to leave behind everything they own, Manami snatches Yujiin, their beloved dog, into her coat before anyone sees. Sadly, a soldier catches Manami, and Yujiin is left behind in a crate. Heartbroken, guilt-ridden over Yujiin, and fearful of their Manzanar “prison-village,” Manami loses her voice. The relentless, swirling red dirt that coats her throat with mud worsens her silence. Her parents try to make a home in their one-room barrack, while their son, Ron, leaves college to join them. A breath of fresh air is felt when Manami meets her teacher, Miss Rosalie, who doesn’t make her speak but offers Manami plenty of paper and pencils. When Manami sends hand-drawn messages via the wind to Yujiin, she hopes that the little dog will get them and find his way back home. Hardships, injustice, and the emotional truth of Manami’s camp life are thoughtfully portrayed through simple and heart-rending prose. Despite the barbed wire fence and harsh climate, Mother’s garden, mounds bearing garlic and onion seeds, becomes a symbol for resiliency. Graceful moments between Manami and Grandfather shine, giving hope to an unbearable situation.
This historical debut speaks volumes of love and longing. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-374-30216-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Margaret Ferguson/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
The bird’s-eye view into this pivotal moment provides a powerful story, one that adults will applaud—but between the...
The ugly brutality of the Jim Crow South is recounted in dulcet, poetic tones, creating a harsh and fascinating blend.
Fact and fiction pair in the story of Rose Lee Carter, 13, as she copes with life in a racially divided world. It splits wide open when a 14-year-old boy from Chicago named Emmett Till goes missing. Jackson superbly blends the history into her narrative. The suffocating heat, oppression, and despair African-Americans experienced in 1955 Mississippi resonate. And the author effectively creates a protagonist with plenty of suffering all her own. Practically abandoned by her mother, Rose Lee is reviled in her own home for the darkness of her brown skin. The author ably captures the fear and dread of each day and excels when she shows the peril of blacks trying to assert their right to vote in the South, likely a foreign concept to today’s kids. Where the book fails, however, is in its overuse of descriptors and dialect and the near-sociopathic zeal of Rose Lee's grandmother Ma Pearl and her lighter-skinned cousin Queen. Ma Pearl is an emotionally remote tyrant who seems to derive glee from crushing Rose Lee's spirits. And Queen is so glib and self-centered she's almost a cartoon.
The bird’s-eye view into this pivotal moment provides a powerful story, one that adults will applaud—but between the avalanche of old-South homilies and Rose Lee’s relentlessly hopeless struggle, it may be a hard sell for younger readers. (Historical fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-544-78510-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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