Placide vividly evokes the Haitian immigrant community in her compelling debut. Although Mardi Desravines alone among her family was actually born in the US, she spent most of her childhood with her grandmother in Haiti. But her beloved Uncle Perrin’s involvement in the unrest of 1991 forces Mardi and her extended family to flee to her parents’ home in New York. Two years later, Mardi still has trouble fitting in, despite her intelligence and diligence. She is mocked as an “island girl” by her classmates, while her close-knit family accuses her of becoming “fresh” and unruly. It gradually appears that something deeper haunts Mardi, something that causes her to put rocks in her bed to prevent dreams and to punish herself with blows and cuts. Her hidden torment boils over with her uncle’s sudden reappearance. While the chronological jumps in the narrative can be disconcerting, Placide does a fine job of slowly uncovering the reasons for Mardi’s anguish and shame. The final revelation (that she was raped by soldiers while in hiding) is depicted with delicacy, and her family’s angry shock and clumsy but sincere support feels painfully genuine. Mardi’s voice is direct, honest, and deceptively simple, peppered with both French and Créole made clear in context, and the setting is redolent with the tastes, smells, and sounds of the neighborhood. The glimpses of the supporting characters are sufficiently rich as to leave the reader wondering about their untold stories. An absorbing window into a vibrant, complex community. (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-32753-6
Page Count: 213
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
At the end of the term, a new student who is black and Vietnamese finds a morsel of hope that she too will find a place in...
This is almost like a play for 18 voices, as Grimes (Stepping Out with Grandma Mac, not reviewed, etc.) moves her narration among a group of high school students in the Bronx.
The English teacher, Mr. Ward, accepts a set of poems from Wesley, his response to a month of reading poetry from the Harlem Renaissance. Soon there’s an open-mike poetry reading, sponsored by Mr. Ward, every month, and then later, every week. The chapters in the students’ voices alternate with the poems read by that student, defiant, shy, terrified. All of them, black, Latino, white, male, and female, talk about the unease and alienation endemic to their ages, and they do it in fresh and appealing voices. Among them: Janelle, who is tired of being called fat; Leslie, who finds friendship in another who has lost her mom; Diondra, who hides her art from her father; Tyrone, who has faith in words and in his “moms”; Devon, whose love for books and jazz gets jeers. Beyond those capsules are rich and complex teens, and their tentative reaching out to each other increases as through the poems they also find more of themselves. Steve writes: “But hey! Joy / is not a crime, though / some people / make it seem so.”
At the end of the term, a new student who is black and Vietnamese finds a morsel of hope that she too will find a place in the poetry. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8037-2569-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
Though it lacks references or suggestions for further reading, Arn's agonizing story is compelling enough that many readers...
A harrowing tale of survival in the Killing Fields.
The childhood of Arn Chorn-Pond has been captured for young readers before, in Michelle Lord and Shino Arihara's picture book, A Song for Cambodia (2008). McCormick, known for issue-oriented realism, offers a fictionalized retelling of Chorn-Pond's youth for older readers. McCormick's version begins when the Khmer Rouge marches into 11-year-old Arn's Cambodian neighborhood and forces everyone into the country. Arn doesn't understand what the Khmer Rouge stands for; he only knows that over the next several years he and the other children shrink away on a handful of rice a day, while the corpses of adults pile ever higher in the mango grove. Arn does what he must to survive—and, wherever possible, to protect a small pocket of children and adults around him. Arn's chilling history pulls no punches, trusting its readers to cope with the reality of children forced to participate in murder, torture, sexual exploitation and genocide. This gut-wrenching tale is marred only by the author's choice to use broken English for both dialogue and description. Chorn-Pond, in real life, has spoken eloquently (and fluently) on the influence he's gained by learning English; this prose diminishes both his struggle and his story.
Though it lacks references or suggestions for further reading, Arn's agonizing story is compelling enough that many readers will seek out the history themselves. (preface, author's note) (Historical fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-173093-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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