It’s important that this survivor testimony has been captured, but this is not a particularly compelling addition to the...
An account of the Holocaust through the eyes of 7-year-old Lyuba, a real Jewish girl who survived by hiding in a haystack for 18 months.
It is 1941, and Lyuba and her mother have been terribly injured in a pogrom. Her father is making preparations that Lyuba, for the most part, doesn’t understand and can’t explain, though she knows that life has gotten scary. When the Nazis prepare to murder everyone in the ghetto, Lyuba’s parents send away her sister, Hanna, who is blonde and blue-eyed and can pass for non-Jewish. (Horribly, Hanna is the only member of the family not to survive the war; she is captured and tortured to death at age 11, as readers learn toward the end.) Lyuba and her parents, meanwhile, hide for a year and a half in the haystack of their beloved Ukrainian friend Pavlo. They whisper, barely moving, and fall silent when warned of Nazis by Pavlo’s dog. A few chapters purport to be from the dog’s perspective rather than Lyuba’s; these impair the book’s verisimilitude without improving the emotional or narrative flow. Overall, much of the process is choppy, and Lyuba’s naiveté necessarily restricts the narrative. A biographical note by MacWilliams, who interviewed Lyuba (now known as Laura Oberlender), tells us that she came to the United States, married, and now has six granddaughters.
It’s important that this survivor testimony has been captured, but this is not a particularly compelling addition to the rich canon of Holocaust survivor memoirs for children. (historical note, photographs) (Historical fiction. 7-10)Pub Date: March 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-947175-09-9
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Serving House Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
A lighthearted recap of some of our oldest tales.
For her latest cartoon foray into ancient cultures, Williams concocts a brisk dash through Egyptian myth and history.
Drawing figures in traditional Egyptian style but with a more natural range of expressions and gestures, she constructs flat-planed scenes that range from small sequential strips to full-page images and even larger ones on double gatefolds. Her nine episodes begin with a creation myth, end with Cleopatra’s death and in between introduce a select set of major gods and Pharaohs. Large and small, each picture is decked with strings of hieroglyphic-like signs for atmosphere as well as side comments in dialogue balloons to go with the short, legible captions. Though she freely mixes legend and fact without distinguishing one from the other in the main going, a smaller strip running below provides a cat’s-eye view of the subject. The patterns of Egyptian daily life (“Cats are Egypt’s greatest wonder, followed by the river Nile”), how mummies were made (“Yes, we do cats, too!”), early technological advances and general cultural values receive tongue-in-cheek glosses. The colorful, briefly told stories provide nothing like a systematic overview but are easily enjoyed for themselves, and they may well leave young readers with a hankering to find out more about Isis and Horus, Zoser, Hatshepsut, Tutankhamen and the rest.
A lighthearted recap of some of our oldest tales. (map) (Picture book/folklore. 7-10)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-7636-5308-8
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
In a boyish three-day adventure, Teedie (Roosevelt) and Johnnie (Muir) dodge, if temporarily, the confines of more formal...
Theodore Roosevelt’s 1903 trip to the western parks included a backcountry camping trip—complete with snowstorm—with John Muir in the Yosemite Wilderness and informed the president’s subsequent advocacy for national parks and monuments.
In a boyish three-day adventure, Teedie (Roosevelt) and Johnnie (Muir) dodge, if temporarily, the confines of more formal surroundings to experience firsthand the glories of the mountains and ancient forests. (You can't ever quite take the boy out of the man, and Rosenstock's use of her subjects’ childhood names evokes a sense of Neverland ebullience, even as the grownup men decided the fate of the wilderness.) The narrative is intimate and yet conveys the importance of the encounter both as a magnificent getaway for the lively president and a chance for the brilliant environmentalist to tell the trees’ side of the story. Gerstein’s depiction of the exuberant president riding off with Muir is enchantingly comical and liberating. A lovely two-page spread turns the opening to a long vertical to show the two men in the Mariposa Grove, relatively small even on horseback, surrounded by the hush and grandeur of the giant sequoias, while in another double-page scene, after a photo of the two at Glacier Point, Muir lies on his back at the edge of the canyon, demonstrating to an attentive Roosevelt how the glacier carved the deep valley below. An author’s note explains that the dialogue is imagined and reconstructed from Muir’s writing as well as from other accounts of the meeting.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8037-3710-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Nov. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2011
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