A quirky and vivid primer for parents to teach kids about environmentalism.
In this debut graphic novel, two siblings escape their foster mother and survive in the woods on wits, magic, and love.
Brother and Sister are First Nation children who live in a tightly knit community. One cruel day, they’re abducted and placed in foster care. Their new mother is Thoxweya, a witch from a lineage descended from the original woman of that name who lured children into the woods to eat them. In their new home, Brother and Sister become servants to Thoxweya and her daughter. When the siblings decide to run away one night, the witch curses all surrounding sources of water. While traveling through the woods, Brother tries to quench his thirst at a fountain, then a brook. Sister’s closeness to nature helps her hear the warnings, and she stops him. But eventually, he drinks from a spring and transforms into an elk. Brother and Sister come to terms with their new dilemma and choose to stay strong. They build a shelter in the woods of their people’s ancestral land, surviving on berries, roots, and mushrooms. Brother wears their grandmother’s locket around his furry neck for strength, but is it enough to protect him from a nearby camp of hunters? In this charming, educational tale, Harris uses bits from the Brothers Grimm (“Brüderchen und Schwesterchen”), the actual legend of Thoxweya, and her own fiction to illustrate sustainable living choices. Vibrant photography—especially the outdoor scenes—provides backgrounds while meticulously crafted dolls act out the script. Light digital effects add personality to the figures and magic to the transformations. At the end of the story, the author emphasizes underlying themes for her younger audience with a mock-up article titled “We Need to Protect the Planet We Depend On.” Boldface phrases, such as “vote with your pocket book,” “insincere politics,” and “even if it’s inconvenient and hard,” are ones adults should discuss in detail with children. Harris’ wisdom applies to readers of all ages: “Everyone should keep a vigilant eye on the goings-on in the world outside their own small one.”
A quirky and vivid primer for parents to teach kids about environmentalism.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-9959311-4-5
Page Count: 38
Publisher: TaleFeather Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PROFILES
PERSPECTIVES
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