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THE GIANT-SLAYER

Name: THE GIANT-SLAYER
Author: Iain Lawrence
ISBN: 978-0-385-73376-2

by Iain Lawrence ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 10, 2009

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The year is 1955, and 11-year-old Laurie Valentine is lonely. Her father is a fundraiser for polio prevention and is so paranoid about the disease that his daughter is terrified of daffodils—the harbinger of polio season. When Laurie’s only friend in the world, Dickie Espinosa, contracts polio and ends up in an iron lung, she sneaks off to the hospital and begins to tell her tragically captive audience a fantastical story about a six-ton giant named Collosso and the boy who was born to slay him—populating her richly drawn world with greedy charlatans, Gypsies, great hunters, gnomes and the shamefully unmagical Swamp Witch who is “half woman, half baloney.” The children’s eager interruptions, predictions and interpretations—aptly peppered with ’50s lingo and cultural references—all shape a fluid narrative that will break readers’ hearts and then, impossibly, lift them back up. This profound, magical, dryly comical novel reminds readers of the power of story, but they will already be feeling it in their bones. Masterful. (author’s note about the history of polio in North America, acknowledgments) (Historical fiction. 11 & up)

Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2009

ISBN: 978-0-385-73376-2

Page Count: 304

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009

Categories:

CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FIRE ON HEADLESS MOUNTAIN
by Iain Lawrence

- BOOK REVIEW
DEADMAN'S CASTLE
by Iain Lawrence

- BOOK REVIEW
THE SKELETON TREE
by Iain Lawrence

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DUST OF EDEN

by Mariko Nagai ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2014

An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American...

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Crystal-clear prose poems paint a heart-rending picture of 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa’s journey from Seattle to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.

This vividly wrought story of displacement, told from Mina’s first-person perspective, begins as it did for so many Japanese-Americans: with the bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. The backlash of her Seattle community is instantaneous (“Jap, Jap, Jap, the word bounces / around the walls of the hall”), and Mina chronicles its effects on her family with a heavy heart. “I am an American, I scream / in my head, but my mouth is stuffed / with rocks; my body is a stone, like the statue / of a little Buddha Grandpa prays to.” When Roosevelt decrees that West Coast Japanese-Americans are to be imprisoned in inland camps, the Tagawas board up their house, leaving the cat, Grandpa’s roses and Mina’s best friend behind. Following the Tagawas from Washington’s Puyallup Assembly Center to Idaho’s Minidoka Relocation Center (near the titular town of Eden), the narrative continues in poems and letters. In them, injustices such as endless camp lines sit alongside even larger ones, such as the government’s asking interned young men, including Mina’s brother, to fight for America.

An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American internment. (historical note) (Verse/historical fiction. 11-14)

Pub Date: March 1, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-8075-1739-0

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Whitman

Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014

Categories:

CHILDREN'S FAMILY | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION

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THE RIVER BETWEEN US

by Richard Peck ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2003

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“Imagine an age when there were still people around who’d seen U.S. Grant with their own eyes, and men who’d voted for Lincoln.” Fifteen-year-old Howard Leland Hutchings visits his father’s family in Grand Tower, Illinois, in 1916, and meets four old people who raised his father. The only thing he knows about them is that they lived through the Civil War. Grandma Tilly, slender as a girl but with a face “wrinkled like a walnut,” tells Howard their story. Sitting up on the Devil’s Backbone overlooking the Mississippi River, she “handed over the past like a parcel.” It’s a story of two mysterious women from New Orleans, of ghosts, soldiers, and seers, of quadroons, racism, time, and the river. Peck writes beautifully, bringing history alive through Tilly’s marvelous voice and deftly handling themes of family, race, war, and history. A rich tale full of magic, mystery, and surprise. (author’s note) (Fiction. 12+)