A compelling story grounded in historical pain but weakened by its handling of racism.
This prequel to Flying With a Broken Wing (2013) and Cammie Takes Flight (2017) addresses a dark chapter in Nova Scotia history.
When 12-year-old Tulia May is not busy helping her hardworking laundress mother, she dreams about meeting the baby Dionne quintuplets. Tulia’s widowed mother works for the Ideal Maternity Home in rural East Chester in 1939. It’s a facility where unwed mothers can give birth in discreet secrecy—however, as Tulia and her friend Finny Paul begin to suspect, not everything is as it seems. The mystery becomes even more urgent when Becky, Tulia’s unmarried older sister, finds herself pregnant and resident in the home. It emerges that some babies are being starved and their bodies secretly disposed of while others are sold to wealthy families. Tulia naturally wonders what will become of Becky and her baby. The book does an admirable job of navigating the painful complexities of adoption, infant death, unplanned pregnancy, and women’s limited choices, all presented through Tulia’s young eyes. Most characters are White; First Nations character Finny is the target of verbal and physical racist assaults throughout. His portrayal unfortunately lacks depth, and his treatment is given inadequate context by the publisher’s opening note on language, with the result that his suffering feels voyeuristic and exploitative. While this work, based on real events, can stand on its own, the unresolved loose threads will leave readers wondering what happens next.
A compelling story grounded in historical pain but weakened by its handling of racism. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: April 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-77108-934-0
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Nimbus Publishing
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2021
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
Nineteenth-century tomboy Louisa Cosgrove wants to study medicine, but after her indulgent father's death, that dream seems impossibly distant. Her mother dispatches her to family friends, but Louisa never arrives. Instead, she is taken to Wildthorn Hall, an insane asylum. The staff insist her name is Lucy Childs, and her treatment ranges from the relatively benign (tranquilizers) to the horrific (sensory deprivation). The mystery of Louisa's incarceration is revealed through alternating chapters of her present and childhood: Like many of her fellow "patients," Louisa's been committed for being a troublesome woman. Luckily, her family doesn't know of those tendencies that would make her utterly irredeemable—her overly fond feelings for her beautiful cousin Grace. Unlike many of the other inmates, who seem to develop mental illness from the cruelty of their surroundings, Louisa is determined to escape, perhaps with the help of a lovely asylum employee, Eliza. Despite a too-pat ending, Louisa and Eliza provide a window into a shameful history of mental health care and women's incarceration that only ended in living memory. (Historical fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-547-37017-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
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