A worthy introduction to an important slice of history.
A family struggles to survive the Irish Potato Famine in 1846.
Following the onset of the blight that caused massive crop failure the previous summer, 12-year-old Lorraine hopes that her family’s efforts on their small tenant farm in County Galway will put enough food on the table to get through winter. Their freshly planted spuds rot practically overnight, though, and Lorraine, her little brother, Paddy, and their Ma and Da join neighbors in a fight to stay alive. Napoli shows her considerable talent for drawing readers into her protagonist’s world through Lorraine’s frank, first-person account of her circumstances. The narrative, like Lorraine, is grounded in the natural world. While foraging meager greens for the family’s supper, Lorraine encounters a girl on the grounds of the English landlord’s manor. Miss Susanna is the pampered landlord’s daughter who tells Lorraine that “you Irish are irresponsible, having children you can’t take care of” and that they are to blame for their own starvation, even as she shares some of her doll’s picnic. Miss Susanna serves as stand-in for the English attitude toward the Irish. Her imperious attitude—giving orders to Lorraine and ignoring the obvious poverty of the tenant farmers—is set against Lorraine’s story, giving young readers a lens through which to understand the history of oppression. The author makes it clear in endnotes that it’s worth noting the similarities to the plight of modern-day refugees. Although the publisher aims this book at teens, Lorraine’s age suggests a middle-grade audience, and there’s nothing about the content or the sophistication of storytelling that skews the age up.
A worthy introduction to an important slice of history. (map, glossary, bibliography, timeline) (Historical fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Feb. 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-7749-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 21, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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