Hilarious costumed hijinks in the spirit of Meg Cabot
Ex-boyfriend angst, new-boyfriend jitters and best-friend snits are a heck of a lot funnier when they take place at a historical-reenactment village.
Chelsea's summer job is a junior interpreter at Colonial Essex Village, where she dons floor-length petticoats to teach tourists about history (which really means pointing them toward the bathroom). The junior interpreters at Colonial Essex Village are locked in an endless War: not with the Redcoats, but with the Civil War reenactors from across the street. Those farbs at Civil War Reenactmentland ("farb," the gravest of reenactor insults, meaning sloppy and careless in historical details) have the gall to think they’re the better historical-reenactment site. Every summer, the teenage Colonials plan and implement excellent pranks on the teenage Confederates—and survive mutual pranking in return. But this year's War is more vicious than usual, and (oh, horrors) Chelsea has a crush on a Confederate reenactor. Chelsea's narration is peppered with sharp and witty observation, from her interaction with a tourist who thinks reenactors are American Girl dolls come to life to a conversation with aghast parents who insist they'll love her even if she makes the terrible, uneducated choice of choosing the Civil War over the Revolutionary.
Hilarious costumed hijinks in the spirit of Meg Cabot . (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4424-0682-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon Pulse/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-educated American boys from privileged families have abundant options for college and career. For Chiko, their Burmese counterpart, there are no good choices. There is never enough to eat, and his family lives in constant fear of the military regime that has imprisoned Chiko’s physician father. Soon Chiko is commandeered by the army, trained to hunt down members of the Karenni ethnic minority. Tai, another “recruit,” uses his streetwise survival skills to help them both survive. Meanwhile, Tu Reh, a Karenni youth whose village was torched by the Burmese Army, has been chosen for his first military mission in his people’s resistance movement. How the boys meet and what comes of it is the crux of this multi-voiced novel. While Perkins doesn’t sugarcoat her subject—coming of age in a brutal, fascistic society—this is a gentle story with a lot of heart, suitable for younger readers than the subject matter might suggest. It answers the question, “What is it like to be a child soldier?” clearly, but with hope. (author’s note, historical note) (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58089-328-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
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
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