An atmospheric, thoughtfully spun tale by a first-time author.
In this debut novel for middle school readers, a young girl in 1920s Tennessee begins piecing together memories that seem to be at odds with her isolated backwoods life.
In a harrowing opening, tiny 3-year-old Emma is stolen away from her loving Tennessee family. Flash forward seven years: Emma is now named Clara, and her “Ma,” a reclusive woman named Mattie, doesn’t want her to have contact with outsiders because “[n]o one was to know that Clara wasn’t their biological child.” However, Clara secretly defies Ma’s order and meets Marissa, a young girl her own age. For Clara, the meeting is a revelation, as she has never attended school and has no memory of ever seeing anyone except Ma, Pa and members of one nearby family. She asks Marissa to teach her to read, and Marissa gives her a tantalizing taste of the ABCs. Later, Clara is allowed to accompany Pa on a wagon trip into town, and she encounters a woman who triggers confusing flashes of memory. Soon after, Clara wonders why she starts hearing the name “Emma” in her dreams. Pritchard makes clear that Ma and Pa aren’t evil, explaining in effective, age-appropriate language the dysfunctional situation that led to the kidnapping: A woman whose desperation for a child stemmed from her childhood fears of abandonment, and a reticent husband who, despite his objections, fell in line to appease her. A truly unsavory character does crop up later, but the author handles the threat with care for her target audience. The engaging mystery comes not in puzzling out Clara’s real identity, but in how and when Clara will realize who she really is—or if she will reunite with her real parents. A brief, satisfying epilogue gives readers a glimpse of Emma’s future.
An atmospheric, thoughtfully spun tale by a first-time author.Pub Date: March 21, 2013
ISBN: 978-1475978056
Page Count: 72
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
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