Salva Dut is 11 years old when war raging in the Sudan separates him from his family. To avoid the conflict, he walks for years with other refugees, seeking sanctuary and scarce food and water. Park simply yet convincingly depicts the chaos of war and an unforgiving landscape as they expose Salva to cruelties both natural and man-made. The lessons Salva remembers from his family keep him from despair during harsh times in refugee camps and enable him, as a young man, to begin a new life in America. As Salva’s story unfolds, readers also learn about another Sudanese youth, Nya, and how these two stories connect contributes to the satisfying conclusion. This story is told as fiction, but it is based on real-life experiences of one of the “Lost Boys” of the Sudan. Salva and Nya’s compelling voices lift their narrative out of the “issue” of the Sudanese War, and only occasionally does the explanation of necessary context intrude in the storytelling. Salva’s heroism and the truth that water is a source of both conflict and reconciliation receive equal, crystal-clear emphasis in this heartfelt account. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-547-25127-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2010
SEEN & HEARD
Not even in the same League as Scott Seegert’s funnier and far more useful Vordak the Incomprehensible: How to Grow Up and...
A phoned-in guide to world domination for the easily amused.
Nesbitt offers rightly characterized “brief period[s] of simulated education” (“Your arch is the curve on the bottom of your foot, so an arch nemesis is an enemy that you want to step on”) punctuated by boob, doo-doo and butt jokes. The author lays out a ten–or-so–step program for would-be supervillains—from becoming a genius overnight by playing more video games to acquiring evil minions and robots along with the requisite lair, look, cackle, motto and booty (“Hey! Stop that! Are you laughing at the BIG, SHINY BOOTY? You are?”). He also wanders off on tangents that will likely lose even his intended audience, suggesting such family-friendly pranks as resetting all of the household clocks and watches or periodically announcing that he’s taking a break or that his brother has dropped a hamster down his pants. Long’s small spot cartoon drawings supply neither humor nor relief.
Not even in the same League as Scott Seegert’s funnier and far more useful Vordak the Incomprehensible: How to Grow Up and Rule the World (2010). (Humor. 10-12)Pub Date: July 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4022-3834-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Sourcebooks Jabberwocky
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A culturally tone deaf exercise in narcissism.
Opening with a flash-forward teaser, this unpersuasive debut quickly fizzles.
The only home Luchi Ann, 13, has known is the women’s prison in northern Thailand where she was born to a jailed American mother who supervised her impressive education (history, philosophy, art, calculus and languages). After her mother dies, blonde Luchi Ann sets off alone, with the kindly warden’s blessing, to “search for answers” to the mystery of her mother’s incarceration. (Why she doesn’t just ask the warden is another mystery.) Carrying her mother’s ashes, money and a few phone numbers but little else, she accepts a ride to Bangkok with the warden’s nephew. Like the plot, Luchi Ann never achieves credibility. Puzzlingly, she neither confides in nor seeks help from sympathetic adults in Thailand. They, for their part, neither question her nor intervene to protect her. Luchi Ann’s sensibility and breathless present-tense narration, with pauses to rhapsodize about her future, belong more to an entitled girl of privilege than an orphan child adrift in an alien world. Reduced to generic, travel-brochure descriptions of countryside and city, vibrant Thailand feels drably insubstantial, the literary equivalent of an exotic background for a fashion-magazine spread. Equally generic are the Thai characters, enablers on Luchi Ann’s self-absorbed journey.
A culturally tone deaf exercise in narcissism. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8027-2297-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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