Seventeen-year-old Ellie is a lovely overachiever who sets lofty standards for herself and those around her, perhaps one of the reasons she rejects her jock-boyfriend Ryan’s highly romantic overtures and has drifted apart from her slightly younger, aggressively imperfect sister, Megan. After fighting with Ryan, Ellie is seriously burned in a tragic accident, and the book’s subtitle, “Truth’s found when beauty’s lost,” sums up the message. As Ellie’s recovery progresses haltingly, Ryan and Megan are very supportive, but she rejects their efforts and questions her faith. Home from the hospital, she is forced to make hard decisions about her now-uncertain future. The third-person narration alternates between the sisters with occasional excerpts from an anonymous blog providing additional insight. Characters are generally believable, and Ellie’s difficult recovery and boyfriend issues will provide fodder for discussion. While the message usually refrains from overpowering the predictable, sometimes slow-paced story line, a pointless subplot centered around a grandfather who loved Megan but detested Ellie weakens the narrative. Still, an acceptable purchase for Christian literature collections. (Fiction. 12 & up)
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59554-357-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
Evil that is impossibly difficult to comprehend and filled with word-images that will leave readers gasping. The author’s...
Gerta didn’t know she was Jewish until she and her father were taken for transport by the Nazis.
When Bergen-Belsen is liberated, Gerta and the other survivors are ill, skeletal, dying, or sunk in madness, and they have no homes to which they can return. Relating the events that led her there, she tells of a seemingly carefree life in Würzburg with her musician father and German gentile stepmother, an opera singer who is also Gerta’s voice teacher. But they were living with false identification papers, and their lives become ever more withdrawn. She has fleeting visions of her early childhood in Köln, of her mother, and of Kristallnacht. The cattle-car journey to Theresienstadt is only the beginning of days, weeks, months, years filled with unspeakable horrors in the “intricacies of the Nazi web…the animalization of human souls.” Then comes Auschwitz, where her father is gassed, then Bergen-Belsen, typhus, and, finally, a kind of awakening to her own humanity. Later she covertly enters British-occupied Palestine, Eratz Yisrael, and builds a life there. Stamper spares readers nothing. Everything that Gerta witnesses or experiences really happened in the hell that was the Holocaust, including the further humiliations in its aftermath, a rarely told part of the story. The text is on pale, sepia-toned paper with dark, eerie illustrations in the same tones, reminiscent of real drawings produced by camp inmates.
Evil that is impossibly difficult to comprehend and filled with word-images that will leave readers gasping. The author’s dedication says it all, in both Hebrew and English: “Remember.” (author’s note, map, glossary, resources, acknowledgments; not seen) (Historical fiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-0038-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
A heartbreaking, haunting, and necessary story that offers hope while laying bare the bleakness of the world Tareq leaves...
From award-winning journalist Abawi (The Secret Sky, 2014) comes an unforgettable novel that brings readers face to face with the global refugee crisis.
Tareq, a young Syrian teenager, changes his daily routine as airstrikes on his city increase. When his home is hit by a bomb that kills most of his family in one day, Tareq is suddenly a refugee, traveling with his father and one surviving younger sister, Susan, to another Syrian town, then out of Syria to Turkey. When life in Turkey offers little hope, Tareq’s father sends him and Susan to make the treacherous trip to Greece by water. Through incredible dangers and suffering, they meet refugees and aid workers from across the globe. Abawi integrates just enough background information into the plot to make the story and characters comprehensible. The narrator is Destiny, whose authoritative voice suits the tragic and dramatic turns of plot. The narrator’s philosophical asides allow readers just enough distance to balance the intimacy of the suffering witnessed along the journey while helping to place the Syrian crisis in global and historical context as part of the cycle of humanity. The direct address challenges readers in a way that is heavy-handed only at the end, but even so it is chillingly effective.
A heartbreaking, haunting, and necessary story that offers hope while laying bare the bleakness of the world Tareq leaves and the new one he seeks to join . (Fiction. 12-18)Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-54683-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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