Not-quite-13-year-old Lulu uncovers family secrets as she struggles to compensate for—and cover up—her beloved grandmother’s mental decline.
With parents who are often (understandably) emotionally unavailable, Lulu is grateful for the constant love and support of her paternal grandmother. But Gram is beginning to be forgetful in frightening ways. Lulu hopes that her own extraordinary memory will help her to figure out how to reverse her grandmother’s decline. Despite the serious subject matter, Lulu’s first-person narration is light and conversational. Each chapter opens with the description of a different part of the human brain, helping to foreshadow the plot’s twists and turns. Over the course of several days and with help from friends Max and Olivia, Lulu attempts to figure out why her allegedly French grandmother has a journal written in Russian—and two different passports. Max and Olivia are convinced that espionage is involved. The subsequent investigation is engaging but not always believable, and Lulu’s insights occasionally make her seem older than her years. The eventual reveal of Gram’s hidden history does not, as Lulu hopes, precipitate a miraculous cure, but it does serve to bring the family closer together. Lulu, her family, and Olivia present white; Max is presumably Latinx (he has a Spanish surname and “speaks Spanish fluently”).
There’s so much going on readers might find it hard to get to know Camiccia’s appealing characters. (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5344-3955-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Aladdin
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
Categories: CHILDREN'S MYSTERY & THRILLER | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
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The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction (Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction—a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.
Five years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her; the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter; later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here; like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events—but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 1, 1989
ISBN: 0547577095
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
Categories: CHILDREN'S SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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