Historical fiction illuminates the events leading up to the 1886 Haymarket Riot. Twelve-year-old Dinah isn’t much different from the mass of poor children working in Chicago’s factories. She’s always hungry; her family shares one room of a tenement with two others; she works 12 hours a day at a clothing factory; she unhappily supplements her family’s meager income through petty theft. But she is different in one key respect: her father is an African-American labor leader who is instrumental in organizing the May 1 march calling for an eight-hour day. When her father is arrested days before the march, Dinah takes it upon herself to free him. Robinet (Walking to the Bus-Rider Blues, 2000, etc.) keeps her young heroine busy, what with work, her rescue mission, and her attendance at various labor gatherings, resulting in a somewhat uneven narrative flow. This is very much fiction-with-a-mission, and it’s perfectly clear who the villains are, but the text strives to avoid oversimplification, including in its set pieces an encounter with a sympathetic police officer and a glimpse of the pressures brought to bear on the harsh manager of the factory where Dinah works. While Dinah’s grasp of the big labor picture and her energy in the face of her privation occasionally strain credulity, they do allow the text to articulate the issues and to take the reader to the scene of the action. In doing so, it introduces them to an episode in US history rarely covered for children—as a bibliography void of children’s titles will attest. (author’s note, bibliography) (Fiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-689-83895-6
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
Categories: CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
When a troubled runaway arrives in an isolated Chinese village where the moon has disappeared, he initiates a quest to find the missing orb and resolve his past.
Escaping from home in a merchant’s cart, Rendi’s abandoned in the Village of Clear Sky, where the innkeeper hires him as chore boy. Bad-tempered and insolent, Rendi hates Clear Sky, but he has no way of leaving the sad village where every night the sky moans and the moon has vanished. The innkeeper’s bossy daughter irritates Rendi. He wonders about the innkeeper’s son who’s disappeared and about peculiar old Mr. Shan, who confuses toads with rabbits. When mysterious Madame Chang arrives at the inn, her storytelling transports Rendi. She challenges him to contribute his own stories, in which he gradually reveals his identity as son of a wealthy magistrate. Realizing there’s a connection between Madame Chang’s stories and the missing moon, Rendi assumes the hero’s mantle, transforming himself from a selfish, self-focused boy into a thoughtful young man who learns the meaning of home, harmony and forgiveness. Lin artfully wraps her hero’s story in alternating layers of Chinese folklore, providing rich cultural context. Detailed, jewel-toned illustrations and spot art reminiscent of Chinese painting highlight key scenes and themes and serve as the focus of an overall exquisite design.
A worthy companion to Lin's Where the Mountain Meets the Moon (2009). (author's note, bibliography of Chinese folk tales) (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-316-12595-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012
Categories: CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
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BOOK REVIEW
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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