An often engaging depiction of characters from immigrant families that’s hampered by uneven execution.
In Krantz’s debut middle-grade tale, best friends face a moral quandary that threatens to destabilize their friendship.
In 1968, in New York City’s Little Italy neighborhood, 13-year-old Stella Bellarosa is overwhelmed by her large, overbearing family. Her parents are always fighting, her sister’s always grandstanding, and her grandparents are always hovering. She faces additional pressures at her Catholic school, and she dreams of winning a scholarship to a Catskills boarding school. However, Stella would only be happy there if her 13-year-old best friend, Pin Pin Yang, a child of Chinese immigrants, attends with her. The girls bond over their similar family dynamics. Pin Pin is worried about purchasing a suitably extravagant present for her baby sister, and her solution is to steal a wallet from one of the nuns—an idea that Stella feels is morally indefensible. Together, they try to slip it back into the nun’s purse, but they’re caught, and Stella takes the blame and the resulting suspension. She’s angry at Pin Pin and also worries about her own relationship with her mother and father and whether they “could stop fighting for once and love me enough to forgive me.” Pin Pin skips school with Stella and they have a grand day out in the city, which clarifies their deep bond. Krantz’s novel portrays immigrant communities of New York in compelling detail, and it effectively depicts the struggles of the girls, who have different personas in school and at home. However, although the book is billed as a middle-grade novel, the complexity of the language puts it firmly at a YA level; there’s also occasional vulgarity (“I’m gonna kick your ass”), and one character makes offensive remarks about Chinese people. A significant amount of Italian dialogue isn’t adequately translated, as well, and the author overuses italics in a way that’s distracting and disruptive.
An often engaging depiction of characters from immigrant families that’s hampered by uneven execution.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-615-90303-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: purple pie press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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