Twelve-year-old Finn, son of Olaf Farseeker, is disappointed when the boat arriving at his village in Greenland is not his father’s, but that of Leif Ericsson. Soon, Finn is a stowaway on Sea Sword, off a-viking, in search of adventure and his father, who has been gone since last season. When caught, Finn is put to work to stand lookout, coil line, haul the sail, cook, take care of the animals and as a skald, or bard, give the crew poems. They go west in search of Vineland and timber and trading goods, following Olaf Farseeker’s route. When the weather worsens and the crew faces storms and fog and risks being lost at sea, Moodie’s writing is at its best, becoming vigorous and spirited as a Viking saga. What began as a quest for adventure and a search for his father becomes an odyssey toward manhood, and the land of promise becomes a “dark realm of doom and mystery,” where Finn proves himself a Viking. A rousing sea adventure. (author’s note) (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59643-050-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Roaring Brook
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
Categories: CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Crystal-clear prose poems paint a heart-rending picture of 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa’s journey from Seattle to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.
This vividly wrought story of displacement, told from Mina’s first-person perspective, begins as it did for so many Japanese-Americans: with the bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. The backlash of her Seattle community is instantaneous (“Jap, Jap, Jap, the word bounces / around the walls of the hall”), and Mina chronicles its effects on her family with a heavy heart. “I am an American, I scream / in my head, but my mouth is stuffed / with rocks; my body is a stone, like the statue / of a little Buddha Grandpa prays to.” When Roosevelt decrees that West Coast Japanese-Americans are to be imprisoned in inland camps, the Tagawas board up their house, leaving the cat, Grandpa’s roses and Mina’s best friend behind. Following the Tagawas from Washington’s Puyallup Assembly Center to Idaho’s Minidoka Relocation Center (near the titular town of Eden), the narrative continues in poems and letters. In them, injustices such as endless camp lines sit alongside even larger ones, such as the government’s asking interned young men, including Mina’s brother, to fight for America.
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American internment. (historical note) (Verse/historical fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8075-1739-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Jan. 29, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
Categories: CHILDREN'S FAMILY | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
Two young people of different generations get profound lessons in the tragic, enduring legacy of war.
Raised on the thrilling yarns of his great-grandpa Jacob and obsessed with both World War II and first-person–shooter video games, Trevor is eager to join the 93-year-old vet when he is invited to revisit the French town his unit had helped to liberate. In alternating chapters, the overseas trip retraces the parallel journeys of two young people—Trevor, 12, and Jacob, in 1944, just five years older—with similarly idealized visions of what war is like as they travel both then and now from Fort Benning to Omaha Beach and then through Normandy. Jacob’s wartime experiences are an absorbing whirl of hard fighting, sudden death, and courageous acts spurred by necessity…but the modern trip turns suspenseful too, as mysterious stalkers leave unsettling tokens and a series of hostile online posts that hint that Jacob doesn’t have just German blood on his hands. Korman acknowledges the widely held view of World War II as a just war but makes his own sympathies plain by repeatedly pointing to the unavoidable price of conflict: “Wars may have winning sides, but everybody loses.” Readers anticipating a heavy-handed moral will appreciate that Trevor arrives at a refreshingly realistic appreciation of video games’ pleasures and limitations. As his dad puts it: “War makes a better video game….But if you’re looking for a way to live, I’ll take peace every time.”
This weave of perceptive, well-told tales wears its agenda with unusual grace. (Fiction/historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-29020-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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