Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Callie and Zettel bring this stellar trilogy to a satisfyingly sentimental conclusion
Calliope Margaret LeRoux deMinuit, half-human and half-Unseelie, Heir to the Midnight Throne, can save or destroy all of fairykind.
Now that Callie and best friend Jack have rescued Callie’s parents, everything’s going to be just fine, right? Jack, Callie and her parents reach Depression-era Chicago, struggling against dangers both magical (cold iron, which has a worse effect on Callie’s Unseelie father, Daniel LeRoux, than on half-fairy Callie) and mundane (the racism of Jim Crow, which endangers dark-skinned Daniel more than light-skinned, half-white Callie). After all the time she and Jack have spent fighting to escape the Seelie and Unseelie courts while rescuing Callie’s folks, she’s confident and independent. But her father is ancient, powerful and protective; Callie hates how Daniel’s “ordering [her] around like a little kid.” Zettel beautifully places this age-old generational conflict into her distinctive world. Callie and Jack want to help the Halfers, half-fairy elemental creatures composed of paper, electricity and other urban magics; Daniel calls them “Undone” and orders Callie to stay far away from the strange magic he despises. Ultimately, all the powers that be want to use Callie’s magic to win the war for their side, and nobody cares what happens to Callie, Jack or the Halfers, raising the stakes to frighteningly high levels.
Callie and Zettel bring this stellar trilogy to a satisfyingly sentimental conclusion . (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: May 27, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-375-86940-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
Thoroughly unpleasant and turgid to boot.
Rats and humans declare war on one another in this gory study in hidden fears and shifting loyalties.
Vaguely Victorian in setting, the narrative switches in short alternating chapters between human and rodent casts. Below ground, Blacker concocts an elaborately structured community of rats who somehow converse nonverbally by telepathic “revelation”; certain virginal bucks can even “hear” ambient information. Overhead, street child Dogboy gets by helping both a rat catcher who collects victims for slaughter in pit fights with dogs and also a crackpot scientist who, allied with an ambitious local politician, is engineering a campaign of fear to fuel large-scale massacres of the rat population. Along with adding a companion for Dogboy in Caz, a younger escapee from a “dance school” that trains girls as playthings for wealthy perverts, the author crafts ugly scenes of human brutality that give the rats—vicious or even cannibalistic as some may be—the moral high ground. Despite some humans whose sympathies lie with the rats, the sides are clearer than the plot, which climaxes in a muddled running battle that ends in a draw and is followed by a contrived happy ending. The fantasy elements do at least provide some distraction from the blunt lambasting of human savagery.
Thoroughly unpleasant and turgid to boot. (rat glossary) (Fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6902-7
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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