An exciting and capable introduction to the always-fascinating tale.
Twelve-year-old Kevin, the class clown, may be fascinated by the Titanic disaster, but he doesn’t expect to go back in time and live through the shipwreck.
Some chapters of this successful introduction to the famous disaster for middle graders take readers to 1912, when 17-year-old Angus Seaton works on a boat out of Halifax, Nova Scotia. Sent to pick up the floating bodies from the Titanic, Angus pulls a dead girl from the water and pockets her little purse. He intends to return it to the body but forgets about it for too long. Later her ghost haunts him, crying for her lost baby. When modern-day Kevin’s family inherits Seaton’s house, Kevin finds the purse and, with it, the ghost. Eventually Kevin finds himself actually on board the sinking Titanic, rushing to find the girl to set her spirit free. Lawson creates a believable class cut-up in Kevin and keeps the narrative moving along whether following Kevin or Angus. Readers see Kevin making poor decisions, but they will also sympathize and like the boy as he chases his obsession with the doomed ocean liner. Although the tone seems light, the events lead to thrilling suspense. Kevin’s trip back to the sinking ship places readers at the scene.
An exciting and capable introduction to the always-fascinating tale. (Paranormal suspense. 8-12)Pub Date: April 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2423-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2012
A timely, challenging book that’s worthy of a read, further discussion, and action.
In a story that explicitly recalls the murder of Tamir Rice, Jerome, a 12-year-old black boy killed by a white Chicago cop, must, along with the ghosts of Emmett Till and others, process what has happened and how.
With the rising tide of today’s Movement for Black Lives, there has been a re-examination of how the 1955 murder of Emmett Till became the fuel for the mid-20th-century civil rights movement. With this narrative in mind, Rhodes seeks to make Till’s story relevant to the post-millennial generation. Readers meet Jerome, who’s bullied at his troubled and underfunded neighborhood school, just at the time that Latinx newcomer Carlos arrives from San Antonio. After finding that Carlos’ toy gun may help keep the school bullies at bay, Jerome is taken by surprise while playing in the park when a white arriving police officer summarily shoots him dead. The police officer’s daughter, Sarah, is the only character who can truly see the ghost boys as they all struggle to process that day and move forward. Written in nonlinear chapters that travel between the afterlife and the lead-up to the unfortunate day, the novel weaves in how historical and sociopolitical realities come to bear on black families, suggesting what can be done to move the future toward a more just direction—albeit not without somewhat flattening the righteous rage of the African-American community in emphasizing the more palatable universal values of “friendship. Kindness. Understanding.”
A timely, challenging book that’s worthy of a read, further discussion, and action. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-26228-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
SEEN & HEARD
Both an excellent, inclusive narration of important historical events and a fast-paced, entertaining read.
Gratz (Refugee, 2017, etc.) weaves together fictionalized accounts of individual experiences of D-Day, the “beginning of the end of the Second World War.”
The action begins just before dawn on June 6, 1944, and ends near midnight that same day. Six different operations in settings across Europe, each fictionalized with imagined characters but based on true events, exemplify the ordinary people in extraordinary situations who risked or gave their lives to destroy what Gen. Eisenhower styled “the German war machine” and “Nazi tyranny.” The narrative moves from scene to scene as the day marches on—a sea invasion, French citizens and Resistance fighters on land, and soldiers arriving by air—but repeatedly returns to Dee, a German fighting on the American side and hiding his German identity from comrades like Sid, a Jewish American determined to wipe out the Germans even as he suffers insults from his peers. The vigorously diverse cast is historically accurate but unusual for a World War II novel, including a young Algerian woman, a white Canadian, a Cree First Nations lance corporal from Quebec, British soldiers, a black American medic, and a Frenchwoman. The horrors of war and the decisions and emotions it entails are presented with unflinching honesty through characters readers can feel for. In the end, all the threads come together to drive home the point that allies are “stronger together.”
Both an excellent, inclusive narration of important historical events and a fast-paced, entertaining read. (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-338-24572-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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