Insightful and compassionate storytelling.
In this fresh take on a familiar paradigm, a sensitive teen inherits a well-kept family secret touching on Sweden’s role in World War II that’s profoundly affected her family.
It’s been five years since their mother died, but Louisa and her older sister, Greta, like their dad, still haven’t healed. Greta’s miserable, but Louisa approves their father’s decision, prompted by his own mother’s death, to move the family to his childhood home in Pennsylvania. Long estranged from his parents, he’s a proponent of never looking back. Louisa begins to wonder: Who was her dad as a child? What made him the man he is now? More than ready for change, Louisa enjoys school, especially photography class, and basks in unaccustomed attention from two boys. She’d be content to float along on the sparkling present but for the calls on the old, disconnected rotary phone in the attic that anchor her to the past. Each time she answers, a voice begins to relay a chapter, drawn from the well of vanished family history, in the life of her father’s father in Sweden. He and his twin brother were barely adults when war broke out and increasingly troubled by Sweden’s compromised neutrality. Subplots and an awkward, occult plot device briefly distract, but Louisa and her taut, fragile connection to a rarely explored past hold readers’ interest.
Insightful and compassionate storytelling. (Historical fantasy. 12-16)Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4405-8306-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Merit Press
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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
Heartbreaking, historical, and a little bit hopeful.
January 1945: as Russians advance through East Prussia, four teens’ lives converge in hopes of escape.
Returning to the successful formula of her highly lauded debut, Between Shades of Gray (2011), Sepetys combines research (described in extensive backmatter) with well-crafted fiction to bring to life another little-known story: the sinking (from Soviet torpedoes) of the German ship Wilhelm Gustloff. Told in four alternating voices—Lithuanian nurse Joana, Polish Emilia, Prussian forger Florian, and German soldier Alfred—with often contemporary cadences, this stints on neither history nor fiction. The three sympathetic refugees and their motley companions (especially an orphaned boy and an elderly shoemaker) make it clear that while the Gustloff was a German ship full of German civilians and soldiers during World War II, its sinking was still a tragedy. Only Alfred, stationed on the Gustloff, lacks sympathy; almost a caricature, he is self-delusional, unlikable, a Hitler worshiper. As a vehicle for exposition, however, and a reminder of Germany’s role in the war, he serves an invaluable purpose that almost makes up for the mustache-twirling quality of his petty villainy. The inevitability of the ending (including the loss of several characters) doesn’t change its poignancy, and the short chapters and slowly revealed back stories for each character guarantee the pages keep turning.
Heartbreaking, historical, and a little bit hopeful. (author’s note, research and sources, maps) (Historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-16030-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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