A wealthy girl in early 20th-century England is exposed to the suffragist movement and eventually shipped off to her grandparents in the Caribbean in this uneven work of historical fiction. Twelve-year-old Hazel Mull-Dare, the daughter of the protagonist of Hearn’s earlier novel Ivy (2008), is heartbroken when her beloved father suffers a breakdown and disappears into a sanatorium. At the same time, she and her friends, including a devious American, decide to stage an action in the name of women’s voting rights. The resulting scandal provides the impetus for her banishment to the family’s sugar plantation, where the naïve, privileged Hazel receives a lesson in the perils of post-colonial living. It is here, finally, that this novel really shines—replete with rich imagery and a nicely eerie folk legend. Most successfully explored is Hazel’s realization of her own family’s culpability in the historical and continual abuse of those they held as slaves. However, while intriguing concepts and even flashes of humor abound throughout, the section set in England stretches on interminably, leaving many threads unresolved. (Historical fiction. 12-16)
Pub Date: Nov. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4169-2504-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
In ten short stories, Soto (Buried Onions, 1997, etc.) presents a kaleidoscope of Mexican-American adolescents and the bullies they confront—bullies ranging from tough, menacing teens to life’s unavoidable truths. The stories are as diverse as the characters, from cat-fighting girls to insecure boys. Among the best: “Your Turn, Norma,” a heartbreaking account of a persecuted girl and her struggle to protect the doll she is charged with carrying for a week as part of a class assignment; “Born Worker,” which juxtaposes a hard-working, salt-of-the-earth boy with his scheming, lazy cousin; and “Mother’s Clothes” in which a girl copes with grief by hunting out and taking back her dead mother’s clothing, dispensed to thrift shops by her father. All of the stories exhibit dazzling imagery and Soto’s intense understanding of his subjects. He deftly brings to light relationships and their complications among family, peers, and elders in a well-crafted collection that’s lively, absorbing, and meaningful. (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-201658-9
Page Count: 157
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1998
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