It is notable especially for the attention paid to the experience of San Francisco’s Chinese immigrants, and a good choice...
Eight-year-old Henry Travis and nine-year-old Chin, son of the family houseboy, experience the events of the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 that destroyed both the Travis’s wealthy home and the Chin’s tenement apartment.
Yep intersperses the fiction of Henry and Chin’s experiences with short chapters of facts about the earthquake and subsequent fire. This is a timely reminder of a historical disaster that turned over 2000 acres of city into a wasteland. Each chapter is headed with a time and place to help less than proficient readers keep track of the narrative strands. Simple sentence structure and the use of present tense throughout make this a very accessible introduction. With little character development, the focus is on the what rather than the who. Still, this is solid historical fiction full of details about the times and backed up with an afterword explaining the author’s connection and suggesting sources for further reading.
It is notable especially for the attention paid to the experience of San Francisco’s Chinese immigrants, and a good choice for reluctant readers. (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: April 4, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-027524-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A picture book combines the exuberance of children and the drama found in nature for a sly lesson on power-sharing. Henderson (Newborn, 1999, etc.) lands on the wide reaches of a windy beach where young Jim expansively flings wide his arms and claims “All this is mine!” So it seems until the wind blows in a gale so violent that it smashes objects and tears “through the dreams of people sleeping.” An eerie series of black-and-white paintings shows the white-capped waves breaking ever higher and crashing inland; these are so frightening that Jim cries out to his mother, “The sea! It’s coming!” Happily enough, Jim and his mother are able to run up the hill to a grandmother’s house where they weather the storm safely. The next time Jim speaks to the wind, on a much quieter beach, he whispers, “All this is yours.” Large type, appealing pastel illustrations, and a dose of proper perspective on humankind’s power over nature make this book a fine choice for story hours as well as nature collections. (Picture book. 5-8)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-7636-0904-8
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
From Harrell (How Thunder and Lightning Came to Be, 1995), a genuine adventure, made compelling by its veracity. When his family is forced by the US government to relocate from their ancestral home in Mississippi to Oklahoma, Minko Ushi and his father, along with Minko’s headstrong and independent pony, Black Spot, travel ahead of the rest of their people to prepare a home. Along the way, they encounter terrible winter storms, bureaucratic bungling, and racism, as well as occasional, unexpected kindness. Then they must build a house, prepare for planting, and help the survivors recover from the disastrous forced march. As a result of his journey, Minko earns the new name Longwalker. Based on stories from the author’s family, this is an exciting survival story. Minko is an appealingly stoic boy, charmingly captured in Meers’s black-and-white drawings. (Fiction. 8-11)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8037-2380-6
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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