At age 13, Peggy already has plenty of experience in archaeology, and she’s determined to let everyone know it in this fourth series installment.
Peggy feels terribly disappointed when her archaeologist friend Eddy can’t take her on a new dig to find evidence of the Vikings at the site of L’Anse aux Meadows in Newfoundland. When a job as the cook’s helper opens up, Eddy scores it for Peggy. Peggy, however, hates cooking and refuses to follow even the simplest recipe. She wants to spend her time with Eddy’s archaeology students on the site, but when she gets the chance, she boasts about her superior knowledge one too many times. Banished, she spends time at the visitors center, where she meets a girl her age, Louise, who has made a pretty impressive find herself. But Louise wants to keep it a secret and excavate it with Peggy’s help. Peggy knows that their efforts would destroy the site, but she can’t break her promise to Louise to keep it secret. Interwoven with Peggy’s story, McMurchy-Barber presents the eventually intersecting story of Sigrid, an ancient Norse girl who dreams of being a warrior instead of a wife. The author confidently presents Peggy as a flawed character with a good heart, and she includes accurate information about the Norsemen.
Together with others in the series, this stands as an excellent vehicle to spur interest in archaeology and history. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Dec. 15, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4597-3072-4
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Dundurn
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Categories: CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION | CHILDREN'S MYSTERY & THRILLER
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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
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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The prolific king of the beach read is back with an intergenerational mystery for the 9-to-12-year-old set.
Ali Cross, the son of Patterson’s most famous creation, African American homicide detective Alex Cross, is “starting to think the worst might have happened” to his mixed-race friend Gabriel “Gabe” Qualls, who disappeared on Dec. 21 and hasn’t been heard from as of Christmas Eve, when the book opens. Ali offers an impromptu prayer for Gabe at the pre-holiday service at his all-black church as well as an impromptu press conference outside of it as journalists and paparazzi confront Alex about his alleged coma-inducing assault of a murder suspect’s father. Then someone robs the Crosses’ home that night along with four other homes; the Crosses’ Christmas gifts are stolen. Ali, obsessed with finding Gabe and feeling that these events will distract his dad and the police from searching for him, starts his own investigation—complete with looking at some contraband footage of Gabe’s unusually loaded backpack obtained by Ali’s stepmother, also a cop—and questioning his school and gaming pals, a diverse group. Writing in Ali’s voice with occasional cutaways to third-person chapters that follow Alex, Patterson sprinkles the narrative with pop-culture references even as he takes readers through the detective process.
Written in workhorse prose, it’s an amiable enough read. (Mystery. 9-12)Pub Date: Nov. 25, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-316-53041-5
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Jimmy Patterson/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
Categories: CHILDREN'S MYSTERY & THRILLER
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