Matt (short for Matilda and not Mattie, thank you) is a teenager whose experiences in the foster system have made her ruefully cynical and bitter. When she comes to live with Sam and Jessica, Matt is puzzled by their commitment to peace—both in their personal lives and in their advocacy against the war in the Middle East. Intrigued, she begins to accompany them to First Day Meetings and learns about the Quaker religion. Matt finds unexpected peace in the silence of Meeting, and begins to practice peace by standing up to a comically belligerent, fiercely pro-war social-studies teacher and a run-of-the-mill school-bus bully, both of whom have their own issues. While the message sometimes seems right on the surface, the setting is unusual and the characters play their roles in ways that readers will understand. As one of the first, if not the first anti-war novel for this generation, Erskine’s story will surely open some minds to the idea that peace is nothing to be ashamed of. A good discussion starter on several levels. (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: June 21, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-399-24774-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2007
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Witty repartee between the central characters, as well as the occasional well-done set piece, isn’t enough to hold this hefty debut together. Teenagers Seth and Kendra are dropped off by traveling parents at their grandfather’s isolated Connecticut estate, and soon discover why he’s so reluctant to have them—the place is a secret haven for magical creatures, both benign and decidedly otherwise. Those others are held in check by a complicated, unwritten and conveniently malleable Compact that is broken on Midsummer Eve, leaving everyone except Kendra captive in a hidden underground chamber with a newly released demon. Mull’s repeated use of the same device to prod the plot along comes off as more labored than comic: Over and over an adult issues a stern but vague warning; Seth ignores it; does some mischief and is sorry afterward. Sometimes Kendra joins in trying to head off her uncommonly dense brother. She comes into her own at the rousing climax, but that takes a long time to arrive; stick with Michael Buckley’s “Sisters Grimm” tales, which carry a similar premise in more amazing and amusing directions. (Fantasy. 11-13)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59038-581-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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