What looks like another kid-with-problem-parents-goes-through- summer-of-change book turns out to be a sensitive picture of a girl countering disruption and death with personal growth. While her mother is dying of cancer, Tommy is sent to stay with her estranged father (Jud) in Maine. Prickly, unfriendly, and critical, Tommy resents her obnoxious aunt (a nurse, who banished her), the harbor town, and Jud, whose home is an untidy shambles and whom she blames for her parents' split. Still, she cleans up the house, accepts a job, and tries to sound upbeat in letters home. In return, her mother writes about her marriage and Tommy's birth, in installments that parallel the present: she too was a ``summer girl'' who got involved with a ``local.'' There the semblance ends: dumping Tommy's father for another man, her mother left Jud so stricken that he barely survived. Though some of the events here are melodramatic, their handling is subtle. Assimilating her mother's revelations and learning to cope with her new life, Tommy grows in understanding; while her immediate reaction to the past's betrayals is never explicitly portrayed, her rages against her father are believable, as are his fumbling but ultimately successful efforts to make a home for the 13-year-old daughter he has always loved from afar. Like Jean Thesman's novels, an engrossing read that offers strong characters and real values. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8037-1153-0
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
After witnessing the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Daniel is suddenly transported, at age 14, from his comfortable life in Frankfurt to a Polish ghetto, then to Auschwitz and Buchenwald—losing most of his family along the way, seeing Nazi brutality of both the casual and the calculated kind, and recording atrocities with a smuggled camera (``What has happened to me?...Who am I? Where am I going?''). Matas, explicating an exhibit of photos and other materials at the new United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, creates a convincing composite youth and experience—fictional but carefully based on survivors' accounts. It's a savage story with no attempt to soften the culpability of the German people; Daniel's profound anger is easier to understand than is his father's compassion or his sister's plea to ``chose love. Always choose love.'' Daniel survives to be reunited, after the war, with his wife-to-be, but his dying friend's last word echoes beyond the happy ending: ``Remember...'' An unusual undertaking, effectively carried out. Chronology; glossary. (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-590-46920-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
The inevitable go-to for Percy’s legions of fans who want the stories behind his stories.
Percy Jackson takes a break from adventuring to serve up the Greek gods like flapjacks at a church breakfast.
Percy is on form as he debriefs readers concerning Chaos, Gaea, Ouranos and Pontus, Dionysus, Ariadne and Persephone, all in his dude’s patter: “He’d forgotten how beautiful Gaea could be when she wasn’t all yelling up in his face.” Here they are, all 12 Olympians, plus many various offspring and associates: the gold standard of dysfunctional families, whom Percy plays like a lute, sometimes lyrically, sometimes with a more sardonic air. Percy’s gift, which is no great secret, is to breathe new life into the gods. Closest attention is paid to the Olympians, but Riordan has a sure touch when it comes to fitting much into a small space—as does Rocco’s artwork, which smokes and writhes on the page as if hit by lightning—so readers will also meet Makaria, “goddess of blessed peaceful deaths,” and the Theban Teiresias, who accidentally sees Athena bathing. She blinds him but also gives him the ability to understand the language of birds. The atmosphere crackles and then dissolves, again and again: “He could even send the Furies after living people if they committed a truly horrific crime—like killing a family member, desecrating a temple, or singing Journey songs on karaoke night.”
The inevitable go-to for Percy’s legions of fans who want the stories behind his stories. (Mythology. 10-14)Pub Date: Aug. 19, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4231-8364-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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