Like Paul Fleischman’s Path of the Pale Horse (1983), which has the same setting, or Anna Myers’s Graveyard Girl (1995),...
In an intense, well-researched tale that will resonate particularly with readers in parts of the country where the West Nile virus and other insect-borne diseases are active, Anderson (Speak, 1999, etc.) takes a Philadelphia teenager through one of the most devastating outbreaks of yellow fever in our country’s history.
It’s 1793, and though business has never been better at the coffeehouse run by Matilda’s widowed, strong-minded mother in what is then the national capital, vague rumors of disease come home to roost when the serving girl dies without warning one August night. Soon church bells are ringing ceaselessly for the dead as panicked residents, amid unrelenting heat and clouds of insects, huddle in their houses, stream out of town, or desperately submit to the conflicting dictates of doctors. Matilda and her mother both collapse, and in the ensuing confusion, they lose track of each other. Witnessing people behaving well and badly, Matilda first recovers slowly in a makeshift hospital, then joins the coffeehouse’s cook, Emma, a free African-American, in tending to the poor and nursing three small, stricken children. When at long last the October frosts signal the epidemic’s end, Emma and Matilda reopen the coffeehouse as partners, and Matilda’s mother turns up—alive, but a trembling shadow of her former self.
Like Paul Fleischman’s Path of the Pale Horse (1983), which has the same setting, or Anna Myers’s Graveyard Girl (1995), about a similar epidemic nearly a century later, readers will find this a gripping picture of disease’s devastating effect on people, and on the social fabric itself. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-689-83858-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
Williams (ABC Kids, below, etc.) takes readers back to a squalid, brutal 15th century for this heavy tale of a family tormented by its dreadful occupation. Because Lily's father and mother are the local lord’s executioners, she and her parents must live outside the town walls, banned from the church, feared, and shunned by all. Ironically, these killers are also healers, making ends meet between executions by providing occasional furtive visitors with herbal poultices and remedies. Lily’s father takes refuge in drink; she and her mother in each other and in caring for injured wild animals. Then the fragile equilibrium that Lily has built shatters as, in succession, her mother sickens and dies, peer pressure destroys a budding friendship with a town child, and her naïve notion that criminals automatically deserve what they get unravels when she witnesses horrible punishments meted out for trivial offenses, then learns that her own mother escaped hanging by marrying her father. She leaves in the end, hoping to escape the stigma. Despite a contrived final hint that Lily has made a new and happier life for herself, this brief story is so weighed down by its tormented cast and narrow setting that it's more akin to John Morressey’s grim Juggler (1996) than Karen Cushman’s Midwife’s Apprentice (1995). (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: June 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8050-6234-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
More “Dear America” than True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, this chatty, awkwardly titled epistolary tale takes a mid–19th-century child on a 19-month voyage aboard a New England whaler with her mother and her father, the captain. Gathering a small menagerie and a flirtatious young third mate for company, Celia experiences terrifying storms, the gruesome business of whale butchering, long stretches of boredom relieved by birthdays, Christmases, and occasional stops to “gam” (visit) other ships. There is also a welcome layover in the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) that turns tragic when her mother has, then loses, a baby. At last, discouraged by the scarcity of whales, Celia’s father decides to turn homeward, only to succumb to a mortal illness that leaves the two women to derail an attempted mutiny and to navigate back around Cape Horn to Massachusetts. Demas (Littlest Matryoshka, 1999) laces Celia’s narrative with happy encounters and places her amidst a cast of familiar, well-defined character types, so that her journey is more a coming-of-age adventure than a tally of crushing disasters. Readers will be carried along by the quick pace and the ever-present sense that fortune and misfortune lurk just beneath the next rolling wave. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: June 30, 2000
ISBN: 0-06-028717-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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