A personal, political, and powerful imagining of the early life of the late activist
A passion for social justice blossoms during the middle school years for the girl who grew up to become Dr. Betty Shabazz.
Loved but unwanted by her mother, 11-year-old Betty finds solace in friends and church. In 1945 Detroit, Betty’s African-American church community is a hub for activism in the face of Jim Crow racism, police brutality, and economic inequality. With renowned guests such as Thurgood Marshall and Paul Robeson coming to speak and perform, Betty and her friends are swept up in the fervor and demand for social justice that would become a movement. They volunteer for the Housewives’ League, a group that encourages the community to give its dollars to black-owned and -employing businesses. But the movement is also personal for Betty, who struggles to find her place in a world that treats brown-skinned black girls as lesser—less beautiful, less worthy, less deserving. Authored by her daughter Ilyasah Shabazz in collaboration with Watson, this moving fictional account of the early life of the late civil rights leader and widow of Malcolm X draws on the recollections of family and friends. The result is a heart-rending imagining of Shabazz’s personal challenges as well as a rare, intimate look at the complex roots of the American civil rights movement.
A personal, political, and powerful imagining of the early life of the late activist . (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-374-30610-6
Page Count: 246
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2017
Twelve-year-old Derek—a notoriously reluctant reader of everything but Calvin and Hobbes—would rather set the grass on fire with his sister’s old sunlamp than tackle his summer reading list. More than that, though, he wants to figure out why his mom’s acting so weird about the ten-year-old article he found from a Martha’s Vineyard newspaper entitled “LOCAL GIRL FOUND DEAD ON BEACH.” That mystery threads throughout this engaging middle-grade novel, told in a dryly hilarious first-person voice. Words like “impulse” and “discipline” are illustrated Pictionary-style by the author’s teenage son, mirroring Derek’s vocabulary-building technique: “My parents insist I use this system all the time, so I usually pretend I’m a spy being tortured by Super Evildoers who force me to practice ‘active reading’ or be killed by a foreign assassin.” When he’s not making avocado grenades, the smart-alecky Derek reveals himself as an endearing softy who loves his friends, family and dog and is even capable, in time, of befriending—horrors!—the class goody-goody. A kinder, gentler Wimpy Kid with all the fun and more plot. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: July 6, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8903-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Christy Ottaviano/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A thought-provoking title for sophisticated readers.
A missing boy returns from another world. Will anyone believe his story?
When 12-year-old Aidan goes missing, his family and community members search everywhere in their small town. Things progress from worrying to terrifying when Aidan doesn’t turn up. No note. No trace. Not even a body. Six days later, Aidan’s younger brother, Lucas, finds Aidan alive in the attic they’d searched many times before. Aidan claims he was in a magical world called Aveinieu and that he got there through a dresser. While everyone around the brothers searches for answers, Lucas gets Aidan to open up about Aveinieu. Lucas, who narrates the story, grapples with the impossibility of the situation as he pieces it all together. Is any part of Aidan’s story true? YA veteran Levithan’s first foray into middle grade is a poignant tale of brotherly love and family trauma. The introspective writing, funneled through a precocious narrator, is as much about what truth means as about what happened. Though an engaging read for the way it makes readers consider and reconsider the mystery, the slow burn may deter those craving tidy resolutions. Bookish readers, however, will delight in the homages to well-known books, including When You Reach Me and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The cast defaults to White; the matter-of-fact inclusion of LGBTQ+ characters is noteworthy.
A thought-provoking title for sophisticated readers. (Mystery/fantasy. 10-13)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-984848-59-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 24, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2021
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