Past lives, small-town secrets, and the unsolved disappearance of a four-year-old all come together in Littke’s readable, but uneven novel. Fifteen-year-old Carlene and her mother have returned to the small town where Carlene’s little brother disappeared 18 years earlier. Although Keith vanished before Carlene was born, she has lived with the consequences of the tragedy: her mother’s bottomless grief and the resulting breakup of the marriage and loss of her father. The discovery of a child’s clothing in an old mine brings her mother back to the scene of the crime and she is driven to find out what happened to her son once and for all. The town seems to be caught in a time warp: the same people are there, doing the same things they were doing at the time of the tragedy. Almost immediately, Carlene begins “remembering” events that happened in the town, things she clearly could not have been privy to. She begins to think she may be experiencing memories from a past life that somehow link her to Keith’s disappearance. While this plot line has the potential to be hokey, Littke pulls it off until the final chapters, when a past-life regression goes bad and the events surrounding Keith’s vanishing and subsequent death are replayed with the same key players involved all over again. Until then, the story was fairly believable. The handful of main characters are well developed, the small town has just enough eccentrics to keep things interesting, and Carlene is a well-rounded, typical teenager, alternately despising her mother for making her leave her friends and feeling sorry for the immense loss to their family. Only partly successful. (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6730-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though it lacks references or suggestions for further reading, Arn's agonizing story is compelling enough that many readers...
A harrowing tale of survival in the Killing Fields.
The childhood of Arn Chorn-Pond has been captured for young readers before, in Michelle Lord and Shino Arihara's picture book, A Song for Cambodia (2008). McCormick, known for issue-oriented realism, offers a fictionalized retelling of Chorn-Pond's youth for older readers. McCormick's version begins when the Khmer Rouge marches into 11-year-old Arn's Cambodian neighborhood and forces everyone into the country. Arn doesn't understand what the Khmer Rouge stands for; he only knows that over the next several years he and the other children shrink away on a handful of rice a day, while the corpses of adults pile ever higher in the mango grove. Arn does what he must to survive—and, wherever possible, to protect a small pocket of children and adults around him. Arn's chilling history pulls no punches, trusting its readers to cope with the reality of children forced to participate in murder, torture, sexual exploitation and genocide. This gut-wrenching tale is marred only by the author's choice to use broken English for both dialogue and description. Chorn-Pond, in real life, has spoken eloquently (and fluently) on the influence he's gained by learning English; this prose diminishes both his struggle and his story.
Though it lacks references or suggestions for further reading, Arn's agonizing story is compelling enough that many readers will seek out the history themselves. (preface, author's note) (Historical fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-173093-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
When Clara Luna, 14, visits rural Mexico for the summer to visit the paternal grandparents she has never met, she cannot know her trip will involve an emotional and spiritual journey into her family’s past and a deep connection to a rich heritage of which she was barely aware. Long estranged from his parents, Clara’s father had entered the U.S. illegally years before, subsequently becoming a successful business owner who never spoke about what he left behind. Clara’s journey into her grandmother’s history (told in alternating chapters with Clara’s own first-person narrative) and her discovery that she, like her grandmother and ancestors, has a gift for healing, awakens her to the simple, mystical joys of a rural lifestyle she comes to love and wholly embrace. Painfully aware of not fitting into suburban teen life in her native Maryland, Clara awakens to feeling alive in Mexico and realizes a sweet first love with Pedro, a charming goat herder. Beautifully written, this is filled with evocative language that is rich in imagery and nuance and speaks to the connections that bind us all. Add a thrilling adventure and all the makings of an entrancing read are here. (glossaries) (Fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2006
ISBN: 0-385-73343-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2006
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