Scary things are happening, but Maggie can protect everyone if she gets her ritualized recitations right.
“It’s the night we’re going to get murdered so we’re sleeping on the living room floor,” she opens her narration. There’s just been a murder nearby, and the suspect is uncaptured. Mom and Dad aren’t worried, but anxiety and dread are big inside Maggie. Vulnerable baby bunnies next door are being raised for a restaurant; a classmate’s expecting a gun for his 12th birthday and seems likely to use it; and the murderer could be close by. Lane’s prose is quietly powerful, plain yet poetic: “my stomach doesn’t want me to go outside.” Tormented with intrusive visualizations of violence, Maggie holds her breath for counts of 60 and always recites her not-quite-prayer pleas twice each: “Please don’t let Gordy or the murderer kill us or anyone, please don’t let Gordy or the murderer kill us or anyone.” Things are scary, though Maggie also clearly has OCD or a like illness (never named); readers feel her anxiety and burden through her compulsory rituals, which will “keep us all from dying and keep the baby bunnies safe.” Maggie and her environment are presumably white; nonwhite allusions like “teepee eyebrows” are used as flavor, while two evidently black classmates are used as a historical desegregation reference, much to Maggie's discomfort.
A tender, sober portrait of a middle schooler with OCD. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-316-25781-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
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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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A 15-year-old girl in Colombia, doing time in a remote detention center, orchestrates a jail break and tries to get home.
"People say drugs and alcohol are the greatest and most persuasive narcotics—the elements most likely to ruin a life. They're wrong. It's love." As the U.S. recovers from the repeal of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, from the misery of separations on the border, from both the idea and the reality of a wall around the United States, Engel's vital story of a divided Colombian family is a book we need to read. Weaving Andean myth and natural symbolism into her narrative—condors signify mating for life, jaguars revenge; the embattled Colombians are "a singed species of birds without feathers who can still fly"; children born in one country and raised in another are "repotted flowers, creatures forced to live in the wrong habitat"—she follows Talia, the youngest child, on a complex journey. Having committed a violent crime not long before she was scheduled to leave her father in Bogotá to join her mother and siblings in New Jersey, she winds up in a horrible Catholic juvie from which she must escape in order to make her plane. Hence the book's wonderful first sentence: "It was her idea to tie up the nun." Talia's cross-country journey is interwoven with the story of her parents' early romance, their migration to the United States, her father's deportation, her grandmother's death, the struggle to reunite. In the latter third of the book, surprising narrative shifts are made to include the voices of Talia's siblings, raised in the U.S. This provides interesting new perspectives, but it is a little awkward to break the fourth wall so late in the book. Attention, TV and movie people: This story is made for the screen.
The rare immigrant chronicle that is as long on hope as it is on heartbreak.Pub Date: March 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-982159-46-7
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
Categories: LITERARY FICTION | FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP
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SEEN & HEARD
Parallel storylines take readers through the lives of two young people on Sept. 11 in 2001 and 2019.
In the contemporary timeline, Reshmina is an Afghan girl living in foothills near the Pakistan border that are a battleground between the Taliban and U.S. armed forces. She is keen to improve her English while her twin brother, Pasoon, is inspired by the Taliban and wants to avenge their older sister, killed by an American bomb on her wedding day. Reshmina helps a wounded American soldier, making her village a Taliban target. In 2001, Brandon Chavez is spending the day with his father, who works at the World Trade Center’s Windows on the World restaurant. Brandon is heading to the underground mall when a plane piloted by al-Qaida hits the tower, and his father is among those killed. The two storylines develop in parallel through alternating chapters. Gratz’s deeply moving writing paints vivid images of the loss and fear of those who lived through the trauma of 9/11. However, this nuance doesn’t extend to the Afghan characters; Reshmina and Pasoon feel one-dimensional. Descriptions of the Taliban’s Afghan victims and Reshmina's gentle father notwithstanding, references to all young men eventually joining the Taliban and Pasoon's zeal for their cause counteract this messaging. Explanations for the U.S. military invasion of Afghanistan in the author’s note and in characters’ conversations too simplistically present the U.S. presence.
Falters in its oversimplified portrayal of a complicated region and people. (author’s note) (Fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-24575-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
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