A young orphan’s dog turns out to be considerably more than she seems in this Canadian wilderness tale set in the years following the American Revolution. Unwanted by his Scots relatives, Callum goes involuntarily from Edinburgh to his Uncle Rory’s remote farm in Upper Canada. Just before arriving, he impulsively spends most of his savings to buy an abused dog, plus a small, sealed box, from a vicious, oddly tattooed stranger. It’s a good investment, as it turns out, for Dog not only seems to understand everything that’s said to her, but repeatedly rescues Callum from the consequences of his own carelessness or ignorance, often saving lives in the process. Dog’s almost human awareness—along with selkie stories and songs from his homeland—gives Callum clues to her true nature and a willingness to credit them. Subject to severe mood swings driven by his distaste for farm work on one side and a growing love for his cousins and their kind-hearted father on the other, Callum makes an appealing protagonist whose relationship with Dog grows into warm respect after sundry adventures. Rather than take her cues from traditional selkie tales and end on a tragic or poignant note, Chan has Callum give Dog her freedom—the human skin in the box—and discover that their friendship survives. A well-knit, outdoorsy tale. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55074-895-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Kids Can
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
From England’s Children’s Laureate, a searing WWI-era tale of a close extended family repeatedly struck by adversity and injustice. On vigil in the trenches, 17-year-old Thomas Peaceful looks back at a childhood marked by guilt over his father’s death, anger at the shabby treatment his strong-minded mother receives from the local squire and others—and deep devotion to her, to his brain-damaged brother Big Joe, and especially to his other older brother Charlie, whom he has followed into the army by lying about his age. Weaving telling incidents together, Morpurgo surrounds the Peacefuls with mean-spirited people at home, and devastating wartime experiences on the front, ultimately setting readers up for a final travesty following Charlie’s refusal of an order to abandon his badly wounded brother. Themes and small-town class issues here may find some resonance on this side of the pond, but the particular cultural and historical context will distance the story from American readers—particularly as the pace is deliberate, and the author’s hints about where it’s all heading are too rare and subtle to create much suspense. (Fiction. 11-13, adult)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-439-63648-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
In an intense, well-researched tale that will resonate particularly with readers in parts of the country where the West Nile virus and other insect-borne diseases are active, Anderson (Speak, 1999, etc.) takes a Philadelphia teenager through one of the most devastating outbreaks of yellow fever in our country’s history. It’s 1793, and though business has never been better at the coffeehouse run by Matilda’s widowed, strong-minded mother in what is then the national capital, vague rumors of disease come home to roost when the serving girl dies without warning one August night. Soon church bells are ringing ceaselessly for the dead as panicked residents, amid unrelenting heat and clouds of insects, huddle in their houses, stream out of town, or desperately submit to the conflicting dictates of doctors. Matilda and her mother both collapse, and in the ensuing confusion, they lose track of each other. Witnessing people behaving well and badly, Matilda first recovers slowly in a makeshift hospital, then joins the coffeehouse’s cook, Emma, a free African-American, in tending to the poor and nursing three small, stricken children. When at long last the October frosts signal the epidemic’s end, Emma and Matilda reopen the coffeehouse as partners, and Matilda’s mother turns up—alive, but a trembling shadow of her former self. Like Paul Fleischman’s Path of the Pale Horse (1983), which has the same setting, or Anna Myers’s Graveyard Girl (1995), about a similar epidemic nearly a century later, readers will find this a gripping picture of disease’s devastating effect on people, and on the social fabric itself. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-689-83858-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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