In this slow-moving contemporary novel, a sixth-grader contrasts her new life in North Dakota with her childhood in Africa, while her family struggles with their differing hopes for the future. When Dakar and her parents move to Cottonwood, North Dakota, for a year, leaving her older sister Jakarta in Africa, nothing seems right to the girl. Her parents, both of whom remain largely one-dimensional characters, only contribute to her worries. Her charismatic father longs to be elsewhere, working with Doctors without Borders or helping refugees. Her mother, who grew up in North Dakota, seems distant and ambivalent about being back. Dakar longs for her sister, but when Jakarta reluctantly joins them, the happy family Dakar hopes for still doesn’t emerge. Instead her mother goes away to help an ailing aunt, not realizing that Dakar’s father leaves shortly after her to do rescue work in Guatemala. While high-schooler Jakarta devotes her time to basketball and leads her team to a series of wins, Dakar spends far too much time alone with no adults to care for her. Dakar’s lyrical memories of Africa help sustain her, but may prove confusing to readers unfamiliar with the countries she mentions. Similarly, her frequent allusions to the Bible, Russian rulers, and The Water Babies will be more distracting than meaningful for many readers. Kurtz’s (Faraway Home, 2000, etc.) love for both Africa and North Dakota comes across clearly, but she has woven too many strands into her novel without strong enough characterizations to hold them together. (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: April 30, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-029401-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Greenwillow Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
After witnessing the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Daniel is suddenly transported, at age 14, from his comfortable life in Frankfurt to a Polish ghetto, then to Auschwitz and Buchenwald—losing most of his family along the way, seeing Nazi brutality of both the casual and the calculated kind, and recording atrocities with a smuggled camera (``What has happened to me?...Who am I? Where am I going?''). Matas, explicating an exhibit of photos and other materials at the new United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, creates a convincing composite youth and experience—fictional but carefully based on survivors' accounts. It's a savage story with no attempt to soften the culpability of the German people; Daniel's profound anger is easier to understand than is his father's compassion or his sister's plea to ``chose love. Always choose love.'' Daniel survives to be reunited, after the war, with his wife-to-be, but his dying friend's last word echoes beyond the happy ending: ``Remember...'' An unusual undertaking, effectively carried out. Chronology; glossary. (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-590-46920-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
Its focus firmly on the details of mountaineering in the French Alps and the Himalayas—mechanics, technique, lore, social milieu—a simplistic novel about an unlikely superheroine (though already making record-breaking climbs while still in her teens, her only major injury occurs early on when a guide hazes her by giving her a double load) who achieves worldwide recognition for her exploits in the 1950's. The tacked-on plot—minor setbacks, a romance with another climber—has less depth than most comic strips and reads like an old-fashioned adulatory biography. Roper is obviously well-acquainted with climbing, and for anyone interested in the subject there's a wealth of information here; he should have omitted the feeble story and added an index. (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-316-75606-7
Page Count: 188
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1991
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