Fifteen-year-old Ben Conrad can’t seem to catch a break. With three self-absorbed older sisters who treat him like a baby, and with a widowed mother who’s still mourning her husband’s loss ten years before and is too busy anyway to notice that her son is growing up, Ben can’t make sense of his life. Who is he? Who will he become? While he does have two best friends who offer solace and support, his life’s on an even more precipitous downturn since he gave up something he’s really good at and enjoys—dancing—and since Claude, the school bully, has become increasingly menacing. Into this turmoil comes elderly great-aunt Frieda, a Mennonite survivor of Stalin’s reign of terror. Her wisdom, patient understanding, and the stories she tells about how she faced up to the tragedies in her life with quiet courage help Ben grow in self-confidence and self-knowledge. How Frieda’s influence helps Ben to work up the nerve to develop a relationship with the girl he likes and to use his dancing skills and natural agility to turn the tables on his nemesis, and, in short, to turn his life around, makes for a satisfying, logical progression of events. This Canadian import by the author of Janey’s Girl (1998) is very well-written, and Ben is a fully realized, funny, and charming character. Whether many young readers will completely buy the premise that a teenager could be so powerfully transformed by an 85-year-old’s accounts of long-ago events, however, is not at all a given. The ending, furthermore, is a bit too pat with the whole family’s sudden awakening to Ben’s needs and feelings. Worth a try, but may be a tough sell. (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 1-55074-781-9
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
Namioka (Den of the White Fox, 1997, etc.) offers readers a glimpse of the ritual of foot-binding, and a surprising heroine whose life is determined by her rejection of that ritual. Ailin is spirited—her family thinks uncontrollable—even at age five, in her family’s compound in China in 1911, she doesn’t want to have her feet bound, especially after Second Sister shows Ailin her own bound feet and tells her how much it hurts. Ailin can see already how bound feet will restrict her movements, and prevent her from running and playing. Her father takes the revolutionary step of permitting her to leave her feet alone, even though the family of Ailin’s betrothed then breaks off the engagement. Ailin goes to the missionary school and learns English; when her father dies and her uncle cuts off funds for tuition, she leaves her family to become a nanny for an American missionary couple’s children. She learns all the daily household chores that were done by servants in her own home, and finds herself, painfully, cut off from her own culture and separate from the Americans. At 16, she decides to go with the missionaries when they return to San Francisco, where she meets and marries another Chinese immigrant who starts his own restaurant. The metaphor of things bound and unbound is a ribbon winding through this vivid narrative; the story moves swiftly, while Ailin is a brave and engaging heroine whose difficult choices reflect her time and her gender. (Fiction. 9-14)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-32666-1
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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