Splendid and enchanting, this book offers a sad, sweet, and entertaining time-travel story.
Sent away for the summer, a high schooler finds his life changed forever by what he discovers in the woods near his grandparents’ house in this YA novel.
It’s Jeremy Biggs’ junior year at West Central High, and this soccer star has the usual concerns: the prom, his upcoming summer job, and the selection of a college, not to mention the day-to-day struggles of any teenager. But Jeremy’s big summer plans are upended when his grandpa has a stroke that causes Jeremy to put his young life on hold so he can spend the summer six hours from home, taking care of his recovering relative in Cedarville, Vermont. There isn’t much to do in Cedarville for a young man. The most interesting thing Jeremy spies is a bit of local history in the woods near his grandparents’ house: a burned-out remnant of an old one-room schoolhouse from 1905. “The Montgomery School,” his grandmother tells him later. “A tragedy. Everybody in the school building at the time was lost….Nobody seems to know for sure what caused the tragedy.” But when Jeremy steps into the wreckage, somehow the past and present are blended, and he is inside the Montgomery School as it was in 1905, along with a dozen students of varying ages. Jeremy spends his afternoons in this class from the past, where he meets Amy Wilshire and begins to fall in love. But each day when the school bell rings in the afternoon, Jeremy is left alone in the remains. Jeremy’s summer is looking up, but his time in the school is marred by the looming shadow of the catastrophe he knows will befall his classmates. The summer may change Jeremy’s life, but is that all? Or is there some way he can save the school and overcome the distance of time to reunite with the girl he loves? Schmeichel (Thorngar: A Bison Adventure, 2016, etc.) deftly layers the hopes and tragedies of Jeremy’s story, twisting the plot at just the right moments to push the novel into compelling wrinkles. Told in Jeremy’s own relatable voice, young readers likely won’t be able to stop turning the pages to find out the ultimate fate of the Montgomery School. With such a strong story and a dramatic climax, some readers may be disappointed by the lack of explanations for what makes Jeremy special. But overall, this hardly dims the beauty of Schmeichel’s poignant tale of young love in unusual circumstances.
Splendid and enchanting, this book offers a sad, sweet, and entertaining time-travel story.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5427-6164-2
Page Count: 160
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
In this riveting futuristic novel, Spaz, a teenage boy with epilepsy, makes a dangerous journey in the company of an old man and a young boy. The old man, Ryter, one of the few people remaining who can read and write, has dedicated his life to recording stories. Ryter feels a kinship with Spaz, who unlike his contemporaries has a strong memory; because of his epilepsy, Spaz cannot use the mind probes that deliver entertainment straight to the brain and rot it in the process. Nearly everyone around him uses probes to escape their life of ruin and poverty, the result of an earthquake that devastated the world decades earlier. Only the “proovs,” genetically improved people, have grass, trees, and blue skies in their aptly named Eden, inaccessible to the “normals” in the Urb. When Spaz sets out to reach his dying younger sister, he and his companions must cross three treacherous zones ruled by powerful bosses. Moving from one peril to the next, they survive only with help from a proov woman. Enriched by Ryter’s allusions to nearly lost literature and full of intriguing, invented slang, the skillful writing paints two pictures of what the world could look like in the future—the burned-out Urb and the pristine Eden—then shows the limits and strengths of each. Philbrick, author of Freak the Mighty (1993) has again created a compelling set of characters that engage the reader with their courage and kindness in a painful world that offers hope, if no happy endings. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-439-08758-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Blue Sky/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
Hillenbrand takes license with the familiar song (the traditional words and music are reproduced at the end) to tell an enchanting story about baby animals picked up by the train and delivered to the children’s zoo. The full-color drawings are transportingly jolly, while the catchy refrain—“See the engine driver pull his little lever”—is certain to delight readers. Once the baby elephant, flamingo, panda, tiger, seal, and kangaroo are taken to the zoo by the train, the children—representing various ethnic backgrounds, and showing one small girl in a wheelchair—arrive. This is a happy book, filled with childhood exuberance. (Picture book. 3-6)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-201804-2
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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