Exciting treasure hunt, refreshingly unromanticized chronic illness—a good combo.
If 13-year-old Blue can find treasure that went down in a ship centuries ago, maybe she can expand her identity.
Family lore says Blue’s “great-times-twelve grandparents” arrived in America as 12-year-olds—one from Amsterdam, one from Java (their story is related in Cast Off, 2015)—and left treasure underwater when their ship sank off Long Island. Blue can’t wait to find it. But in Sag Harbor, “regular families” like Blue’s face wealthy summer vacationers—including a movie star who insists that Blue entertain his rude, spoiled daughter. He dangles a $500,000 diabetes research donation that Blue, “the poster child (literally)” of a diabetes organization, can’t ignore. Luckily, the girls slowly make friends and undertake a grumpy, terrifying, thrilling treasure hunt employing methods hazardous and illegal. Blue’s first-person voice is funny and immediate in her desperation to find the treasure, which connects her to her beloved late grandfather and which, she hopes, will distinguish her from being merely “Diabetes Girl.” Copious nitty-gritty details of blood-sugar management—testing, counting, taking insulin—accurately show diabetes as a frustrating, dangerous, ongoing challenge. Readers will swoon for Blue’s cherished service dog, Otis, who helps keep her safe. Unfortunately, the breezy portrayal of people feeding and touching Otis without permission misleads about (critical) service-dog etiquette. White-presenting Blue’s mixed white and (extremely attenuated) Javanese identity is acknowledged only through the ethnicity of her older relatives.
Exciting treasure hunt, refreshingly unromanticized chronic illness—a good combo. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-316-42437-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit...
The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction (Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction—a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.
Five years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her; the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter; later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here; like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events—but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 1, 1989
ISBN: 0547577095
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
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