An ambitious teen with a voluminous vocabulary beats the odds and spells her way to success. Thirteen-year-old Karlene Bridges lives in Red Clover, S.C. in 1968, where her “heart aches for some . . . freedom.” Karlene would rather “be tumbling down Niagara Falls in a big, stinking barrel than stuck in Red Clover” for the rest of her life. She has big plans to win the Shirley County Spelling Bee, and her free-spirited eighth-grade Latin teacher, Mrs. Harrison, offers to coach her. Reinforced by Mrs. Harrison and her budding sweetheart, Billy Ray, Karlene sweeps the county and state spelling championships, earning a chance to complete in the National Spelling Bee in Washington, D.C. But when her alcoholic father ends up in rehab, Karlene wonders if she has what it takes to be a real champion. Karlene’s engaging personal journey from word whiz-kid to winning young woman is artfully glossed with the emerging feminism of the late 1960s. This first-rate spelldown will have readers spellbound. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Jan. 23, 2007
ISBN: 1-4169-1610-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
Illegal immigrant sisters learn a lot about themselves when their family faces deportation in this compelling contemporary drama. Immigrants from Bangladesh, Nadira, her older sister Aisha and their parents live in New York City with expired visas. Fourteen-year-old Nadira describes herself as “the slow-wit second-born” who follows Aisha, the family star who’s on track for class valedictorian and a top-rate college. Everything changes when post-9/11 government crack-downs on Muslim immigrants push the family to seek asylum in Canada where they are turned away at the border and their father is arrested by U.S. immigration. The sisters return to New York living in constant fear of detection and trying to pretend everything is normal. As months pass, Aisha falls apart while Nadira uses her head in “a right way” to save her father and her family. Nadira’s need for acceptance by her family neatly parallels the family’s desire for acceptance in their adopted country. A perceptive peek into the lives of foreigners on the fringe. (endnote) (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-4169-0351-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Ginee Seo/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2005
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember.
Kai’s life is upended when his coastal village is devastated in Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami in this verse novel from an author who experienced them firsthand.
With his single mother, her parents, and his friend Ryu among the thousands missing or dead, biracial Kai, 17, is dazed and disoriented. His friend Shin’s supportive, but his intact family reminds Kai, whose American dad has been out of touch for years, of his loss. Kai’s isolation is amplified by his uncertain cultural status. Playing soccer and his growing friendship with shy Keiko barely lessen his despair. Then he’s invited to join a group of Japanese teens traveling to New York to meet others who as teenagers lost parents in the 9/11 attacks a decade earlier. Though at first reluctant, Kai agrees to go and, in the process, begins to imagine a future. Like graphic novels, today’s spare novels in verse (the subgenre concerning disasters especially) are significantly shaped by what’s left out. Lacking art’s visceral power to grab attention, verse novels may—as here—feel sparsely plotted with underdeveloped characters portrayed from a distance in elegiac monotone. Kai’s a generic figure, a coat hanger for the disaster’s main event, his victories mostly unearned; in striking contrast, his rural Japanese community and how they endure catastrophe and overwhelming losses—what they do and don’t do for one another, comforts they miss, kindnesses they value—spring to life.
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember. (author preface, afterword) (Verse fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-53474-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
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