A beautiful, sometimes-bittersweet story of friendship overcoming racial obstacles.
In South Carolina in 1945, 12-year-olds Hazel Jackson and Lily Wagner may as well be from different worlds.
Hazel, a Black girl, lives on the “colored” side of Mayfield while Lily, a White girl, lives in the White part of town. Ma Maybelle, Hazel’s grandmother, works for Lily’s family, and Hazel begins to help her grandmother out at her job over the summer. When Lily’s father takes down the “Whites Only” sign from the front entrance of his grocery store, White locals are none too pleased. Lily’s best friend is even ordered to stay away from her. With helping to raise her younger siblings, Hazel has known grown-up responsibilities for most of her life. So even though Ma brings her along to help at the Wagners’, she hopes that it will give Hazel some freedom to be a carefree child. After forming a close friendship thanks to their love of reading, both girls begin to see different aspects of life. Lily’s eyes are opened to the causes and impacts of segregation while Hazel begins to see that she can be a hero and affect change in her own way. Approaching mature subjects through accessible language, Proctor relays a story about harsh, uncomfortable realities while maintaining a thread of hope and compassion. This book introduces themes of standing up for what’s right, allyship, and forgiveness.
A beautiful, sometimes-bittersweet story of friendship overcoming racial obstacles. (author's note, suggested reading) (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-945419-54-6
Page Count: 260
Publisher: Fawkes Press
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
A smooth story for horse-mad readers, but it’s unlikely to find a much larger audience than that.
A "bad lad" combines a passion for horses and music and makes good.
An unnamed protagonist tells his early life story in retrospect for his grandchildren. Born at the end of World War II, never knowing his father, a young boy "no good at anything the teachers wanted me to be good at" learns to play drums under the eye of his only kind teacher. Nevertheless, he falls into worse and worse company, until he becomes a petty thief and then, by age 16, a serious one. Eventually caught, he's sent for a year to a Borstal, a British prison designed to rehabilitate young offenders. He's attracted to the prison's horse farm mostly because the head man plays radio music there, but he soon learns to love the horses, too, particularly an abused young horse named Dombey, with whom he forms a bond. In short order Dombey is sold, the boy's mentor disappears, and the boy is discharged onto the street, where he eventually becomes a soldier and reunites with Dombey. Morpurgo's gently elegant prose makes this slim story flow effortlessly, but there's not much action, and the narrative structure creates a storytelling effect that puts readers at a remove. It reads more like a short story than a novel, even when embellished by Foreman's ink-and-wash illustrations and a 10-page afterward describing the Borstal system and Suffolk Punch horses.
A smooth story for horse-mad readers, but it’s unlikely to find a much larger audience than that. (Historical fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: July 1, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-8481-2471-4
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Piccadilly/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2016
A lovely, lovely tale full of warmth, humor, and intelligence that validates its readership.
Two white, female best friends enter sixth grade, and their friendship becomes complicated.
Tink, 11 going on 12, decides to change her childhood nickname to something more grown-up, and Jackie, her best friend since kindergarten, suggests “Chris”—the abbreviated version of Tink’s given name, Christine. It is Tink’s wrestling with what it means to be the more adult “Chris” that forms the basis of this extraordinarily perceptive story. Jackie and Tink come from different backgrounds: Jackie is the only child of Bess, a single parent who is currently dating a twice-divorced man with two children, while Tink lives with her parents and three siblings in a middle-class home. Jackie, unsurprisingly, has matured emotionally faster than Tink and is now preoccupied with being part of the in “circle” of the sixth grade, to Tink’s confusion and dismay. Young’s deliciously fresh, perspicacious narrative is told in third-person from Tink’s point of view, punctuated with wry telephone conversations between the girls relayed in scriptlike format. She maintains a spot-on, getting-ready-to-leave-behind-childhood-but-not-yet-adult narrative tone as she relays the complex world of sixth grade—a world of cliques and betrayal and, in Tink’s case, the courage to try to sort it all out. Patronization and pandering are completely absent in this original treatment of the theme of belonging.
A lovely, lovely tale full of warmth, humor, and intelligence that validates its readership. (Fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4521-3890-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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