An exciting and unusual story about runaway slaves. Twins Pierre and Andrew have been rescued from slavery by their father, who left them in a wonderful three-story treehouse that he built in the swamps outside New Orleans and who has gone back to the estate where they were enslaved, to also rescue their mother and sister. When he doesn't return, the twins face the possibility that he is dead. They open his trunk and discover that he was one of Jean Lafitte's pirates; soon they are involved in a plan with Lafitte and Andrew Jackson to aid the Americans in the upcoming battle of New Orleans, and to rescue their family and friends from slavery. Robinet (Washington City Is Burning, 1996, etc.) evokes a vivid swamp setting, interweaves the twins' survival story and historical events, and limns the difficult relationship of the twins, who have been played against each other by a cruel master. Young readers will relish the marvelous details of their diet (in which live snails play a large part), their adventurous expeditions across the swamps, often by swinging on ropes, and many other fascinating features of their unconventional life. (map, glossary) (Fiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-689-81208-6
Page Count: 138
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers may wonder if they really needed a poem for every day of the school year.
This novel in verse is a remarkable feat of mimicry. The poems sound exactly like they were written by real fifth-graders.
Ms. Hill’s students, a diverse bunch judging by their names and their pictures, are required to write a poem every morning. (They listen to folk music while they’re writing, which says a lot about Ms. Hill.) One Seuss-inspired poem includes the stanza “Some kids are glad and some are sad. / You sit by Teacher. Were you bad?” That level of authenticity is hard to take unless it reveals something about the characters’ personalities. Happily, many of the students are worth getting to know, like Newt Mathews, a boy with Asperger’s who rescues the frogs hiding in the school’s back brick wall. Their story is compelling enough: as the title hints, the students are trying to prevent their school from being torn down. But too much of the plot feels conventional. When a student gets a crush on a girl who claims to hate him, some readers will pray that they don’t fall in love. The last section of the book is full of lovely, inventive moments. A set of instructions for making a flipbook somehow becomes a metaphor for loss. But too many poems—especially a bad parody of “Big Yellow Taxi”—simply don’t work.
Readers may wonder if they really needed a poem for every day of the school year. (glossary, guide to poetic forms) (Verse novel. 8-12)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-52137-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Wendy Lamb/Random
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Playing on his customary theme that children have more on the ball than adults give them credit for, Clements (Big Al and Shrimpy, p. 951, etc.) pairs a smart, unhappy, rich kid and a small-town teacher too quick to judge on appearances. Knowing that he’ll only be finishing up the term at the local public school near his new country home before hieing off to an exclusive academy, Mark makes no special effort to fit in, just sitting in class and staring moodily out the window. This rubs veteran science teacher Bill Maxwell the wrong way, big time, so that even after Mark realizes that he’s being a snot and tries to make amends, all he gets from Mr. Maxwell is the cold shoulder. Matters come to a head during a long-anticipated class camping trip; after Maxwell catches Mark with a forbidden knife (a camp mate’s, as it turns out) and lowers the boom, Mark storms off into the woods. Unaware that Mark is a well-prepared, enthusiastic (if inexperienced) hiker, Maxwell follows carelessly, sure that the “slacker” will be waiting for rescue around the next bend—and breaks his ankle running down a slope. Reconciliation ensues once he hobbles painfully into Mark’s neatly organized camp, and the two make their way back together. This might have some appeal to fans of Gary Paulsen’s or Will Hobbs’s more catastrophic survival tales, but because Clements pauses to explain—at length—everyone’s history, motives, feelings, and mindset, it reads more like a scenario (albeit an empowering one, at least for children) than a story. Worthy—but just as Maxwell underestimates his new student, so too does Clement underestimate his readers’ ability to figure out for themselves what’s going on in each character’s life and head. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-689-82596-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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