Some may find this overly sweet, but Bo is an endearing Pollyanna in a parka.
A warm tale set in an Alaskan gold-mining town in 1929-30.
Bo, a 5-year-old girl, was adopted as a newborn by two gruff but tenderhearted blacksmiths who’ve toiled in the mining camps of the Yukon for years. These unlikely fathers smoke a bit and swear a bit, but they love Bo with all their hearts. Theirs is an extraordinarily generous, solicitous, close-knit community, comprised of indigenous neighbors and workers from around the world. Events unfold at a leisurely pace in this narrative that’s enriched by authentic details that make the time and place come alive. Readers discover that life in a mining town means surviving brutal winters, handling day-to-day chores in all seasons while still having fun, doing backbreaking labor, and finally, actually extracting the gold from the dirt. (Readers will learn more than they probably ever needed to know about how this is accomplished.) Life in a remote backwater also entails high excitement, such as the townspeople’s first-ever sighting of an airplane and bulldozer. Warmth and love pervade this novel, an Alaskan version of the Little House books, and characters are well-drawn. Some realistically sad and frightening events occur, but the novel ends on a happy, though wistful, note. Final art was not seen, though samples are charming and reinforce the Little House feel.
Some may find this overly sweet, but Bo is an endearing Pollyanna in a parka. (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8050-9351-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: March 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
A vibrant celebration of art’s power to console and heal.
Zora, 12, shares her mother’s artistic gifts, but when grief and guilt lead her to destroy years of drawings, the results are astonishing.
Voom is Zora and her mom’s word for the artistic impulse that bubbles up inside. After disclosing her leukemia diagnosis to Zora and her sister, Frankie, Mom promised the girls she’d beat it. Ten months later, their far sicker mom is hospitalized in Pittsburgh, where the girls share their bus driver grandmother’s basement apartment. Mom continues to be optimistic and avoid acknowledging the possibility of death. Frustrated and needing to hear a realistic prognosis, Zora uses her art to show her mother the truth of how ill she looks. Later that night her mom dies—and Zora’s Voom goes away. When Grandma Wren disappoints Frankie on her seventh birthday, Zora’s guilt-fueled anger erupts. Over Frankie’s protests, Zora scribbles out her drawings until the scribbles fight back, pulling the girls into Pencilvania, a world where each of Zora’s creations lives. Most of her now-animated drawings welcome her—except for one scribbled-out horse who kidnaps Frankie. Guided by a seven-legged horse, the Zoracle (a composite of her early self-portraits), and other charming creations, Zora sets out to rescue Frankie and rediscover the wellspring of creativity that forms her mother’s legacy. Presumed White, the humans are well rounded and believable. Pencilvania’s inhabitants, conceived with humorous, metafictional whimsy, are enlivened with copious, inventive illustrations.
A vibrant celebration of art’s power to console and heal. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-72821-590-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Sourcebooks Young Readers
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2021
The journey is even gently funny—Omakayas’s brother spends much of the year with a porcupine on his head. Charming and...
This third entry in the Birchbark House series takes Omakayas and her family west from their home on the Island of the Golden-Breasted Woodpecker, away from land the U.S. government has claimed.
Difficulties abound; the unknown landscape is fraught with danger, and they are nearing hostile Bwaanag territory. Omakayas’s family is not only close, but growing: The travelers adopt two young chimookoman (white) orphans along the way. When treachery leaves them starving and alone in a northern Minnesota winter, it will take all of their abilities and love to survive. The heartwarming account of Omakayas’s year of travel explores her changing family relationships and culminates in her first moon, the onset of puberty. It would be understandable if this darkest-yet entry in Erdrich’s response to the Little House books were touched by bitterness, yet this gladdening story details Omakayas’s coming-of-age with appealing optimism.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-029787-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2008
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