Sadness and hope combine in this heartfelt British import.
Twelve-year-old Scarlet Ibis Mackenzie struggles to care for her brother and protect her family.
With a mother who sleeps and smokes her way through most days, Scarlet has shouldered most of the household responsibilities as well as the care of her sensitive younger half brother, Red. Scarlet works hard to keep her family together, but it’s not easy to predict her mother’s bouts of anger and melancholy and support her brother through hair-trigger emotional upheavals, all while trying to ward off social worker Mrs. Gideon. Her worst fears are realized when a fire destroys the family’s apartment, and Scarlet is placed in foster care without Red. With some cursory Americanization to help the book make the leap across the pond as well as a dash of her signature wildlife enthusiasm, Lewis explores an array of complexities, all to do with family and resilience. Scarlet’s separation from Red (explained as necessary due to Red’s autism spectrum disorder) exacerbates what Scarlet sees as existing splinters of difference (Red is white like their withdrawn mother, and mixed-race Scarlet is dark-skinned like her absent father). And Scarlet uses Red’s fascination with feathers and birds—including the baby pigeon that survives the apartment fire—to find not only a way into her brother’s world, but the hope of reuniting them in the new security of a foster home.
Sadness and hope combine in this heartfelt British import. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: May 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4814-4941-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2018
A thought-provoking study of a family caught up in both political and domestic crises in a foreign land.
Title notwithstanding, historical events in Ghana remain largely offstage as a 12-year-old, recently arrived from Canada, struggles to cope with her mother’s descent into a nervous breakdown.
Astrid’s father, invited to Accra to help organize a national election, is usually away at work. This leaves her to juggle school, two younger sibs, and a stay-at-home parent whose fear of the local food, water, wildlife and people has resulted in frantic overprotectiveness, irrationally strict rules about permissible activities and increasingly violent emotional outbursts. The domestic tension comes to a head when malaria strikes brother Gordo. Then, amid the widespread turmoil caused by Flight Lt. Jerry Rawlings’ coup (this is 1979, as the historical note informs readers), a soldier robs Astrid’s mother at gunpoint. Otherwise, the violence and unrest are conveyed here more through radio broadcasts and overheard conversations than direct experience. Jones focuses instead on Astrid’s courage, good sense and fundamental kindness in the face of her deteriorating mother’s mood swings and growing distraction, the frustration of being continually kept in the dark by adults about what’s going on in the larger world and the overwhelming responsibility of caring for her brother and sister. Along with hearing her Ghanaian friends’ conflicting feelings about their new government, Astrid weathers her challenges at home admirably.
A thought-provoking study of a family caught up in both political and domestic crises in a foreign land. (Historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4598-0481-4
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Orca
Review Posted Online: Feb. 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2014
Lovely and profound.
A boy in a small Norwegian city comes into his own socially and artistically in this import.
Twelve year-old Bart draws on his seemingly boundless—yet Nordically muted—optimism to manage the challenges of being a physically slight opera lover and the only child of a loving mother whose alcohol addiction has led them to live in a one-room apartment in a building littered with heroin paraphernalia. Sharply observant, Bart keeps his inner and home lives private at school to stay under the radar. Despite routinely running out of money and groceries, he’s just able to manage this delicate balancing act until he gives classmate Ada a CD of him singing, and she shares his ability with a teacher. The teacher insists Bart sing at a school concert, turning the preteen fan of Bryn Terfel into an object of fascination. Soon, obnoxious boys show up at Bart’s run-down public housing project spoiling for a fight, while rumors about his mother fly at school. Bart reveals different aspects of his world slowly, drawing readers in while giving them space to develop mental pictures of his town, school, neighbors, and classmates. Some late plot developments, including Bart’s mother’s near-fatal alcohol poisoning and a man who might be his biological father, are a bit far-fetched, but Bart’s depth and the beauty he finds in his world are winning and moving.
Lovely and profound. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: June 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4814-1542-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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