A winter adventure that should have skipped a print version and gone straight to TV as an after-school special.
Mother Nature battles a girl and her motley crew of sled dogs to a draw in the frozen landscape of eastern Ontario.
Forecasts of a winter storm send Hannah’s Army Reservist father to answer the call of duty, igniting a series of poor choices and near misses for his teenage daughter. In a fit of pique over spending school holidays at the family’s rural cabin, Hannah accidentally breaks her mother’s supply of insulin ampoules. Accompanied by a guilty conscience and four family dogs, Hannah sets out to save the day by dog sledding to the nearest neighbor for help. Unfortunately, the first leg of her endeavor ends with Hannah being greeted by a rifle-wielding woman having combat flashbacks. Hannah escapes with her life and Peter, a recalcitrant teenage passenger whose main contributions to the mission are sarcasm and his ability to start a fire. Anything that could go wrong does, but Hannah keeps moving forward in a learn-as-you-go adventure where only the two lead dogs have any idea what they’re doing. Below zero temperatures do nothing to warm us to either Hannah or Peter, whose snarly personalities wear as thin as the ice one of the dogs falls through. Hannah’s mother is Korean and her father is white; other characters follow a white default.
A winter adventure that should have skipped a print version and gone straight to TV as an after-school special. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4597-4300-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dundurn
Review Posted Online: Jan. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2019
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
Without that frame, this would have been a fine addition to the wacked-out summer-camp subgenre.
Survival camp? How can you not have bad feelings about that?
Sixteen-year-old nerd (or geek, but not dork) Henry Lambert has no desire to go to Strongwoods Survival Camp. His father thinks it might help Henry man up and free him of some of his odd phobias. Randy, Henry’s best friend since kindergarten, is excited at the prospect of going thanks to the camp’s promotional YouTube video, so Henry relents. When they arrive at the shabby camp in the middle of nowhere and meet the possibly insane counselor (and only staff member), Max, Henry’s bad feelings multiply. Max tries to train his five campers with a combination of carrot and stick, but the boys are not athletes, let alone survivalists. When a trio of gangsters drops in on the camp Games to try to collect the debt owed by the owner, the boys suddenly have to put their skills to the test. Too bad they don’t have any—at all. Strand’s summer-camp farce is peopled with sarcastic losers who’re chatty and wry. It’s often funny, and the gags turn in unexpected directions and would do Saturday Night Live skits proud. However, the story’s flow is hampered by an unnecessary and completely unfunny frame that takes place during the premier of the movie the boys make of their experience. The repeated intrusions bring the narrative to a screeching halt.
Without that frame, this would have been a fine addition to the wacked-out summer-camp subgenre. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4022-8455-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2014
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