A funny love story centered on a winning idea: a boy, in love with a girl who fancies herself a future romance author, doesn’t know how to tell her that her writing stinks. Sage Oliver’s romance novel, starring beautiful, smart, sexy Angelica, is moving right along. When she reads chapters out loud to her favorite boy, George Blandford, though, he’s not impressed. Angelica and the Seminole Indians is awful, but George, a secret poet who has loved Sage forever, can’t bring himself to hurt her. His attempts to tell her the truth backfire; Sage is so confident that she misunderstands almost everything he says as further endorsement of her talent. When Sage enters the school’s creative writing contest, George can’t bear the thought of her being exposed to criticism and rejection; as it turns out, she shares first place honors with George and his anonymous poems—the judges thought Sage was parodying the romance genre brilliantly. For Sage, it’s a revelation and a disappointment, but, as this is a comedy, all turns out well. The characters are as interesting and fully formed as the premise, while the Angelica chapters form a lesson in hack-writing that will keep readers amused. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-32622-X
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
This profoundly moving story is all the more impressive because of its basis in fact. Although the story is fictionalized, its most harrowing aspects are true: “Today, more than two hundred million children between the ages of five and seventeen are ‘economically active’ in the world.” Iqbal Masih, a real boy, was murdered at age 13. His killers have never been found, but it’s believed that a cartel of ruthless people overseeing the carpet industry, the “Carpet Mafia,” killed him. The carpet business in Pakistan is the backdrop for the story of a young Pakistani girl in indentured servitude to a factory owner, who also “owned” the bonds of 14 children, indentured by their own families for sorely needed money. Fatima’s first-person narrative grips from the beginning and inspires with every increment of pride and resistance the defiant Iqbal instills in his fellow workers. Although he was murdered for his efforts, Iqbal’s life was not in vain; the accounts here of children who were liberated through his and activist adults’ efforts will move readers for years to come. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-689-85445-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
After witnessing the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Daniel is suddenly transported, at age 14, from his comfortable life in Frankfurt to a Polish ghetto, then to Auschwitz and Buchenwald—losing most of his family along the way, seeing Nazi brutality of both the casual and the calculated kind, and recording atrocities with a smuggled camera (``What has happened to me?...Who am I? Where am I going?''). Matas, explicating an exhibit of photos and other materials at the new United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, creates a convincing composite youth and experience—fictional but carefully based on survivors' accounts. It's a savage story with no attempt to soften the culpability of the German people; Daniel's profound anger is easier to understand than is his father's compassion or his sister's plea to ``chose love. Always choose love.'' Daniel survives to be reunited, after the war, with his wife-to-be, but his dying friend's last word echoes beyond the happy ending: ``Remember...'' An unusual undertaking, effectively carried out. Chronology; glossary. (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-590-46920-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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