An affluent Oregon teenager undergoes some value adjustment when he's forced to help a grower with the strawberry harvest in this earnest and engaging debut. After ramming his Bronco into a water pump on a nighttime jaunt across a bean field, Jeff faces a month's labor to work off the debt. It comes at the worst possible time, as far as he's concerned, for he's angling for a sports scholarship for college and there is a major tennis tournament coming up. Initially uncomfortable with the crew of migrant workers, not to mention the farmer's hostile daughter, Alexa, Jeff fits in quickly; he discovers that he cares more and more about both the crop and the people, and is predictably surprised to learn that one of the rewards of hard physical labor is a new edge on the tennis court. With engrossing authority, Olson describes the trials and satisfactions of running a farm, the process of harvesting, and though she sidesteps many of the controversial aspects of using migrant labor, every comment about ``beaners'' or ``wetbacks'' draws an instant and crushing rejoinder from one character or another. A likable cast and several small plot twists buoy up the agenda, and at peak moments the author's competent prose shows glimmers of something finer. Some will want to balance this employer's-eye view of migrant labor with books such as S. Beth Atkin's Voices from the Fields (1993, not reviewed), but Olson knows how to keep readers turning the pages. (Fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-56397-687-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
Curtis debuts with a ten-year-old's lively account of his teenaged brother's ups and downs. Ken tries to make brother Byron out to be a real juvenile delinquent, but he comes across as more of a comic figure: getting stuck to the car when he kisses his image in a frozen side mirror, terrorized by his mother when she catches him playing with matches in the bathroom, earning a shaved head by coming home with a conk. In between, he defends Ken from a bully and buries a bird he kills by accident. Nonetheless, his parents decide that only a long stay with tough Grandma Sands will turn him around, so they all motor from Michigan to Alabama, arriving in time to witness the infamous September bombing of a Sunday school. Ken is funny and intelligent, but he gives readers a clearer sense of Byron's character than his own and seems strangely unaffected by his isolation and harassment (for his odd look—he has a lazy eye—and high reading level) at school. Curtis tries to shoehorn in more characters and subplots than the story will comfortably bear—as do many first novelists—but he creates a well-knit family and a narrator with a distinct, believable voice. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-32175-9
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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