When his normally quiet Hawaiian town fills up with sailors on shore leave, a naive teenager gets caught in a street brawl and sees his own carelessness with a firearm nearly result in tragedy. Mokes's eagerness to watch his hero, big Booley Domingo, make good on his promise to deck a sailor overcomes his promise to his father—the local chief of police—to be home by six. As in his other books, especially Blue Skin of the Sea (1992), Salisbury expertly captures the flavor of island life, from its relaxed pace to its deeply rooted racial divisions. Booley not only instructs Mokes on the code of the streets, he also fills him in on the spirit world, warning him not to take bones away from a certain old burial site. Both Mokes and Booley are bright enough to know the difference between right and wrong, but not always strong enough to act on that knowledge. In the climactic melee, his judgment impaired by beer and weed, Mokes gets beaten up and watches as Booley points the gun at a police officer and takes a bullet in the leg. Mokes's subsequent remorse is eased by his father's reassuring hug, but the damage is done; Salisbury lets readers draw their own conclusions about the wisdom of sacrificing parental trust for the sake of misguided loyalty. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-385-32237-2
Page Count: 151
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
Miah’s melodramatic death overshadows a tale as rich in social and personal insight as any of Woodson’s previous books.
In a meditative interracial love story with a wrenching climactic twist, Woodson (The House You Pass on the Way, 1997, etc.) offers an appealing pair of teenagers and plenty of intellectual grist, before ending her story with a senseless act of violence.
Jeremiah and Elisha bond from the moment they collide in the hall of their Manhattan prep school: He’s the only child of celebrity parents; she’s the youngest by ten years in a large family. Not only sharply sensitive to the reactions of those around them, Ellie and Miah also discover depths and complexities in their own intense feelings that connect clearly to their experiences, their social environment, and their own characters. In quiet conversations and encounters, Woodson perceptively explores varieties of love, trust, and friendship, as she develops well-articulated histories for both families. Suddenly Miah, forgetting his father’s warning never to be seen running in a white neighborhood, exuberantly dashes into a park and is shot down by police. The parting thought that, willy-nilly, time moves on will be a colder comfort for stunned readers than it evidently is for Ellie.
Miah’s melodramatic death overshadows a tale as rich in social and personal insight as any of Woodson’s previous books. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-23112-9
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
The exodus of the Jews is breaking Dani’s heart: the exodus from Buenos Aires, that is. The 2001 Argentinian currency crisis has destroyed Buenos Aires’s economy, and all of Dani’s friends are moving to Israel or the United States. Dani’s own family, devastated by poverty and her father’s overwhelming depression, is headed to New York. There, in a wealthy suburb, Dani struggles to make friends in a huge, English-speaking public high school. Dani’s high-school problems follow a checklist of issues: autistic friend, mean popular girl, long-distance boyfriend hiding his new romance. The supporting characters act mostly as set dressing—from the bully who vanishes as soon as he has provoked another character’s redemption to the friend from ESL class who has no nationality or history of her own—and the comforting solutions are too pat. Enjoyable enough, so keep this on the shelf to fight misconceptions about terrorism, poverty, immigration and Jews—but don’t expect readers to come begging for more. (Historical fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-15144-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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