An emotional story with a relatable animal protagonist and gentle messages about the interconnectedness of all life.
A young orca’s search for salmon turns into a magical odyssey in Hanna’s debut illustrated chapter book.
Over the course of this brief tale, a whale named Little O braves dangers and unfamiliar seas to find his mother, his pod mates, and the life-giving salmon that have disappeared from the whales’ usual feeding grounds. At various points, he’s threatened by a vicious killer whale who attacks and eats his own kind; he meets a helpful porpoise and a humorous otter; and he gets tangled in some flotsam and rescued by a great blue heron. He also befriends a salmon-seeking grizzly cub, and finds that he can speak with a soulful, light-skinned human named Ruby. The whale encounters the girl as she sails under the night sky and prays to the moon for the salmon to come back. (How humans factor into the ocean’s changes is present but subtly handled.) Little O finds comfort and inspiration in mystical, dream-time sojourns, which involve communing with Mother Nature, flying through the sky, and running through the forest in the form of a human boy. The book leans heavily into the formulaic uplift of slogans such as “follow your heart” and “embrace who you are.” However, Hanna, a poet and visual artist based in British Columbia, goes deeper, with vivid descriptive language; for instance, Little O, in his boy form, touches the clouds, “tugs at the fog, like picking apples from a tree, and scatters the fragile blossoms of white far below.” Throughout, the author communicates empathy and respect for nature through Little O’s adventures and reveals how the disappearance of salmon affects other creatures, including people. The cycle-of-life message at the end is deeply moving, and Hanna’s color illustrations are expressive, with delicate watercolor tints and curving, decorated shapes.
An emotional story with a relatable animal protagonist and gentle messages about the interconnectedness of all life.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-5015-7
Page Count: 96
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Jan. 21, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A meandering and didactic family saga by Chickasaw poet, novelist, and essayist Hogan (Dwellings, p. 835; Mean Spirit, 1990), a tale that attemptsÖ la Little Big Manto rewrite the history of the American West from a Native American perspective. At 17, Angela Jensen decides that it's time to untangle her family, a process she begins by going hometo a remote village in western Canada called Adam's Rib, a place she no longer even recognizes. Angela looks up Agnes Iron, her great-grandmother, whom she's never met, and is soon introduced to Bush, who looked after Angela's deranged mother, Hannah, and raised Angela herself after Hannah's early death. At first, it is information about her motherstories, accounts, explanationsthat most interests Angela, but eventually she understands that the history of her family is woven tightly into the history of her family's tribe and the bloody strife that has colored their lives ever since the white men came among them: ``For us, hell was cleared forests and killed animals. But for them, hell was this world in all its plenitude.'' The troubles have been carried down to the present day, except that now the threat is comprised not of missionaries and European settlers but of government authorities who want to develop the land out of existence through the construction of a mammoth hydroelectric power plant. As her consciousness is raised, Angela begins to recognize her real identity but desires, and the anger that she labors under throughoutand that finds expression mainly in the crudest caricatures of Western culture and North American history imaginableis relieved by the happy fulfillment of her romantic (rather than political) life: a fairy-tale marriage that seems in this terrain to be even more out-of-place than the dam would have been. Tediously obvious and overwritten; Hogan's characters are so excruciatingly limited to the representation of their cultures that they become little more than allegories, reducing the tale to agitprop.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-684-81227-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Though extension is possible, make no mistake about it; this is a ward and not a microcosm.
This is a book which courts the dangers of two extremes.
It can be taken not seriously enough or, more likely, critical climate considered, too seriously. Kesey's first novel is narrated by a half-Indian schizophrenic who has withdrawn completely by feigning deaf-muteness. It is set in a mental ward ruled by Big Nurse—a monumental matriarch who keeps her men in line by some highly original disciplinary measures: Nursey doesn't spank, but oh that electric shock treatment! Into the ward swaggers McMurphy, a lusty gambling man with white whales on his shorts and the psychology of unmarried nurses down to a science. He leads the men on to a series of major victories, including the substitution of recent issues of Nugget and Playboy for some dated McCall's. The fatuity of hospital utilitarianism, that alcohol-swathed brand of idiocy responsible for the custom of waking patients from a deep sleep in order to administer barbiturates, is countered by McMurphy's simple, articulate, logic. This is a thoroughly enthralling, brilliantly tempered novel, peopled by at least two unforgettable characters. (Big Nurse is custom tailored for a busty Eileen Heckert.)
Though extension is possible, make no mistake about it; this is a ward and not a microcosm.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1962
ISBN: 0451163966
Page Count: 335
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1961
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
APPRECIATIONS
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