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
This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.
Pub Date: June 1, 1985
ISBN: 068487122X
Page Count: 872
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985
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SEEN & HEARD
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