Pinning her narrative to a few key historical details, Ayres makes the Pittsburgh Strip during the Depression the setting for Mike Costa’s need to find out why his grandfather is so sick. Costa Brothers Fine Foods means Mike’s father and his three uncles; his grandfather doesn’t always remember that now, and Mike worries about him. Mike likes helping out in the family business—his job is emptying the rat traps in the basement—but he hasn’t quite figured out how to stop Andy Simms from picking on him. Mike doesn’t like Simms calling him Macaroni Boy, and he likes a new name, Rat Boy, even less. The rats seem to be getting sick even before being caught in Mike’s traps, and at first Mike thinks it comes from the rats eating rotten bananas from a warehouse explosion. But when Grandpap begins vomiting blood, Mike wonders if there’s any connection. Mike and his best friend, Joseph Ryan, methodically try to figure out what’s making the rats, and Grandpap, sick, while getting into occasional trouble with the nuns at school and with Simms regularly. Klavon’s, the local ice cream parlor (still in existence), and a local priest who runs a soup kitchen figure in the action, as Joseph and Mike solve the mystery. Vivid touches abound, like Mike and Joseph’s fascination with Joseph’s sisters’ lingerie. While there is little ethnically to distinguish Mike’s Italian-American father and uncles from his Irish mother (except their names), the warmth and family feeling is neatly if sketchily drawn. Enough grisly rat details and boyish bravado to keep the boys reading, and enough local color, familial comfort, and historical minutiae for the girls. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-73016-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
Categories: CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction (Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction—a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.
Five years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her; the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter; later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here; like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events—but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 1, 1989
ISBN: 0547577095
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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The closing of her favorite swimming pool opens 11-year-old Gloriana Hemphill’s eyes to the ugliness of racism in a small Mississippi town in 1964.
Glory can’t believe it… the Hanging Moss Community Pool is closing right before her July Fourth birthday. Not only that, she finds out the closure’s not for the claimed repairs needed, but so Negroes can’t swim there. Tensions have been building since “Freedom Workers” from the North started shaking up status quo, and Glory finds herself embroiled in it when her new, white friend from Ohio boldly drinks from the “Colored Only” fountain. The Hemphills’ African-American maid, Emma, a mother figure to Glory and her sister Jesslyn, tells her, “Don’t be worrying about what you can’t fix, Glory honey.” But Glory does, becoming an activist herself when she writes an indignant letter to the newspaper likening “hateful prejudice” to “dog doo” that makes her preacher papa proud. When she’s not saving the world, reading Nancy Drew or eating Dreamsicles, Glory shares the heartache of being the kid sister of a preoccupied teenager, friendship gone awry and the terrible cost of blabbing people’s secrets… mostly in a humorously sassy first-person voice.
Though occasionally heavy-handed, this debut offers a vivid glimpse of the 1960s South through the eyes of a spirited girl who takes a stand. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-545-33180-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
Categories: CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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