As an aging saber-toothed tiger prowls prehistoric Florida, a young paleo-Indian struggles to escape his tribe's superstitious beliefs. Is the old cat the ghost of a saber-tooth slain four years earlier, come to take its revenge? Is the wanderer Fonn that same ghost, in the shape of a young woman? Dour, the shaman, insists that these things are so, but 12-summer-old Thom wonders: Fonn seems real to him, and she says that the cat is only an animal, huge and ferocious but mortal. As Bonnie Pryor did in Seth of the Lion People (1988), Denzel paints the prehistoric scene in some detail but is less conscientious about creating believable early people—''It is the mark of Smilodon,'' Fonn remarks learnedly, looking at a pawprint. Nonetheless, Denzel offers another well-paced adventure that, like his Boy of the Painted Cave (1988), captures a transition between old and new, ignorance and knowledge. In the end, Thom escapes Dour's influence, and he and Fonn witness an epic battle between Great Claw (the last giant sloth) and the wounded, rabid saber-tooth. Their deaths mark the end of the age of giant mammals; for readers who don't get the point, the author suggests in an afterword that we too shall pass. (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1991
ISBN: 0-399-22101-8
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
After witnessing the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Daniel is suddenly transported, at age 14, from his comfortable life in Frankfurt to a Polish ghetto, then to Auschwitz and Buchenwald—losing most of his family along the way, seeing Nazi brutality of both the casual and the calculated kind, and recording atrocities with a smuggled camera (``What has happened to me?...Who am I? Where am I going?''). Matas, explicating an exhibit of photos and other materials at the new United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, creates a convincing composite youth and experience—fictional but carefully based on survivors' accounts. It's a savage story with no attempt to soften the culpability of the German people; Daniel's profound anger is easier to understand than is his father's compassion or his sister's plea to ``chose love. Always choose love.'' Daniel survives to be reunited, after the war, with his wife-to-be, but his dying friend's last word echoes beyond the happy ending: ``Remember...'' An unusual undertaking, effectively carried out. Chronology; glossary. (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-590-46920-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
If Rotten Ralph were a boy instead of a cat, he might be Joey, the hyperactive hero of Gantos's new book, except that Joey is never bad on purpose. In the first-person narration, it quickly becomes clear that he can't help himself; he's so wound up that he not only practically bounces off walls, he literally swallows his house key (which he wears on a string around his neck and which he pull back up, complete with souvenirs of the food he just ate). Gantos's straightforward view of what it's like to be Joey is so honest it hurts. Joey has been abandoned by his alcoholic father and, for a time, by his mother (who also drinks); his grandmother, just as hyperactive as he is, abuses Joey while he's in her care. One mishap after another leads Joey first from his regular classroom to special education classes and then to a special education school. With medication, counseling, and positive reinforcement, Joey calms down. Despite a lighthearted title and jacket painting, the story is simultaneously comic and horrific; Gantos takes readers right inside a human whirlwind where the ride is bumpy and often frightening, especially for Joey. But a river of compassion for the characters runs through the pages, not only for Joey but for his overextended mom and his usually patient, always worried (if only for their safety) teachers. Mature readers will find this harsh tale softened by unusual empathy and leavened by genuinely funny events. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-374-33664-4
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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