News about the California Gold Rush and myths about the wealth “in plain sight” excite 11-year-old Sarah Corbin’s delightful but feckless farmer father. He takes off, leaving the family to manage at home in Massachusetts. Time in California and on the sea journey is relayed via the occasional letters he sends home to the struggling family. The girl worships her amusing father but is often at sword’s point with her strict, strong mother. But it is she who must fight to keep the farm and family together despite the shame of having to become a factory worker. Sarah and her siblings take up the basic farm work as they hope for their father’s return. Other details include a terrifying barn fire that puts Sarah out of commission and the introduction of a wealthy grandfather, who would take care of the family if his daughter, the mother, would agree. News comes of her father’s death and the family continues to adjust. Until this point, the story makes its point about the other side of the Gold Rush phenomenon: what it was like for the families left behind. Unfortunately, it veers off into a less-satisfying plot device wherein the father is discovered alive and in hiding. Less discerning readers will stick with the story because Sarah is appealing and her trials with her mother and the loss of her father will surely elicit sympathy. While enjoying the melodrama, they’ll also learn a little American history. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-618-19699-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
PLB 0-531-33140-7 Ketcham’s first book is based on an allegedly true story of a childhood incident in the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. It starts with a couple of pages regaling the Bach home and all the Johanns in the family, who made their fame through music. After his father’s death, Johann Sebastian goes to live with his brother, Johann Christoph, where he boasts that he is the best organist in the world. Johann Christoph contradicts him: “Old Adam Reincken is the best.” So Johann Sebastian sets out to hear the master himself. In fact, he is humbled to tears, but there is hope that he will be the world’s best organist one day. Johann Sebastian emerges as little more than a brat, Reincken as more of a suggestion than a character. Bush’s illustrations are most transporting when offering details of the landscape, but his protagonist is too impish to give the story much authority. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-531-30140-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Orchard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
Adler (also with Widener, Lou Gehrig, 1997, etc.) sets his fictional story during the week of July 14, 1932, in the Bronx, when the news items that figure in this tale happened. A boy gets a dime for his birthday, instead of the bicycle he longs for, because it is the Great Depression, and everyone who lives in his neighborhood is poor. While helping his friend Jacob sell newspapers, he discovers that his own father, who leaves the house with a briefcase each day, is selling apples on Webster Avenue along with the other unemployed folk. Jacob takes the narrator to Yankee Stadium with the papers, and people don’t want to hear about the Coney Island fire or the boy who stole so he could get something to eat in jail. They want to hear about Babe Ruth and his 25th homer. As days pass, the narrator keeps selling papers, until the astonishing day when Ruth himself buys a paper from the boy with a five-dollar bill and tells him to keep the change. The acrylic paintings bask in the glow of a storied time, where even row houses and the elevated train have a warm, solid presence. The stadium and Webster Avenue are monuments of memory rather than reality in a style that echoes Thomas Hart Benton’s strong color and exaggerated figures. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-201378-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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