Adroit language textured with edifying insights, verse that is engaging and alive.
In this slim, cross-genre volume of verse, Hillstrom explores humanity’s greatest potential with verve and vitality.
Amidst the rubble of a war-torn city, a grandmother becomes the charge d’affaires for a group of orphans. Seeking shelter for the night, they break away from the file of departing refugees to make camp. Thus opens the story within a story, a fragmented effort with vignettes of stage direction woven with verse that reflect the now-fragmented lives of the conflict’s survivors. As night falls, the matron begins telling the children stories about an exiled welder, woman and poet–three symbolic personae that represent the hope of breaking civilization’s war-rebirth continuum. Alluding to both biblical and modern conflict, Hillstrom creates a vacuum of timelessness, and with this mechanism, the parable becomes one of generations and the passing on of wisdom through the poet. Indeed, the book’s dominant theme is the poet’s development and maturity, yet not to the exclusion of the other characters. Hillstrom’s volume is ambitious, its achievement not in an excessive or flamboyant use of verbiage, but rather in its careful tautness of vagaries. With overtones of solidarity and social responsibility, the author uses the welder, woman and poet to represent forces that–through selflessness and sacrifice–work toward achieving harmony in the new civilization built from ruins of the past. In the Socratic/Platonic tradition, the poet-philosopher is the seer–the visionary martyr who is persecuted and killed for spreading awareness. Evoking ideas ranging from ancient Babylon to labor activist Joe Hill, and conjuring imagery of Eden with the archetypal earthen woman and the all-knowing poet, the pages burn with wonderful allegorical matter that elicit the big question of whether humanity learns from history. In Hillstrom’s view, war’s destruction becomes a hopeful opportunity to re-create with awareness, and civilization’s enlightenment is the implied objective of the poet-philosopher. But in the end, how the future unfolds will be determined by the children.
Adroit language textured with edifying insights, verse that is engaging and alive.Pub Date: July 26, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4196-9866-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
PLB 0-688-13166-2 King Midas And The Golden Touch ($16.00; PLB $15.63; Apr.; 32 pp.; 0-688-13165-4; PLB 0-688-13166-2): The familiar tale of King Midas gets the golden touch in the hands of Craft and Craft (Cupid and Psyche, 1996). The author takes her inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s retelling, capturing the essence of the tale with the use of pithy dialogue and colorful description. Enchanting in their own right, the illustrations summon the Middle Ages as a setting, and incorporate colors so lavish that when they are lost to the uniform gold spurred by King Midas’s touch, the point of the story is further burnished. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-13165-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.
A star-crossed romance captures the turmoil of pre-revolutionary Iran in Seraji’s debut.
From the rooftops of Tehran in 1973, life looks pretty good to 17-year-old Pasha Shahed and his friend Ahmed. They’re bright, funny and good-looking; they’re going to graduate from high school in a year; and they’re in love with a couple of the neighborhood girls. But all is not idyllic. At first the girls scarcely know the boys are alive, and one of them, Zari, is engaged to Doctor—not actually a doctor but an exceptionally gifted and politically committed young Iranian. In this neighborhood, the Shah is a subject of contempt rather than veneration, and residents fear SAVAK, the state’s secret police force, which operates without any restraint. Pasha, the novel’s narrator and prime dreamer, focuses on two key periods in his life: the summer and fall of 1973, when his life is going rather well, and the winter of 1974, when he’s incarcerated in a grim psychiatric hospital. Among the traumatic events he relates are the sudden arrest, imprisonment and presumed execution of Doctor. Pasha feels terrible because he fears he might have inadvertently been responsible for SAVAK having located Doctor’s hiding place; he also feels guilty because he’s always been in love with Zari. She makes a dramatic political statement, setting herself on fire and sending Pasha into emotional turmoil. He is both devastated and further worried when the irrepressible Ahmed also seems to come under suspicion for political activity. Pasha turns bitterly against religion, raising the question of God’s existence in a world in which the bad guys seem so obviously in the ascendant. Yet the badly scarred Zari assures him, “Things will change—they always do.”
Refreshingly filled with love rather than sex, this coming-of-age novel examines the human cost of political repression.Pub Date: May 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-451-22681-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: NAL/Berkley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2009
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
