A strong collection of stories saturated with the scent of the sea, the taste of Guinness, and a rough Gaelic music to the words even when they are spoken in Texas or Liverpool. Shane Connaughton, who wrote the screenplay for My Left Foot, opens with young male love all tied up in an old family house about to be razed. Memories and ghosts in another abandoned family house inhabit June Considine’s “To Dream of White Horses,” perhaps the most intensely felt of the stories. Maeve Binchy (famed novelist and wife of the editor) allows teenage Grania a glimpse of her parents’ very complicated lives; Ita Daly’s “Headstrong Girl” faces her own survival at last at Irish summer camp. Abortion, furtive passions, the vicious war between Catholics and Protestants, and an Irish girl’s epiphany at a Texas greasy spoon: all in the end are backdrops to each protagonist’s finding his or her own self. As with many such collections, the tales are best read individually rather than all at once. (Short stories. YA)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-32571-1
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986
ISBN: 0142413836
Page Count: 209
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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