It’s hard not to weep when white settlers drive the Ojibwe west, and hard not to hope for what comes next for this radiant...
Readers who loved the ways of Omakayas and her family in The Birchbark House (1999) have ample reason to rejoice in this beautifully constructed sequel.
On Madeline Island in Lake Superior at the midpoint of the 19th century, Omakayas lives the turning of an entire year. In summer, a starving remnant of relatives are taken in and cared for; in the fall, stores are laid up and the group returns to their cabins; winter comes with storytelling, Old Tallow’s coat of many furs, and Omakayas’s sister Angeline beading a vest for the man she loves. In spring, Omakayas goes on her own spirit quest and sees her future clear. Omakayas’s relationships with her prickly brother Pinch, the white child she calls Break-Apart Girl and Two Strike, who scorns women’s work, allow for emotional resonance. She learns not only from the hands of her grandmother, mother and Old Tallow, but by her own sharp observation and practice. Eager readers beguiled by her sturdy and engaging person will scarcely notice that they have absorbed great draughts of Ojibwe culture, habits and language.
Pub Date: July 5, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-029789-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
The myriad themes explored are compelling, but the execution gets in the way.
A transracial adoptee navigates a new school, a mentally ill parent, and questions about her identity.
Eleven-year-old Keda, who is black and was adopted as an infant, has just moved to Albuquerque with her parents and older sister, Eve, leaving her best friend (and fellow black adoptee), Lena, behind. At school and around town, Keda knows she sticks out like a sore thumb next to her white family. When her musician father leaves for a world tour, Keda and Eve are left with their mother, whose undiagnosed, unmanaged bipolar disorder is spiraling out of control. The portrayal of their mother’s disability is moving, but stylistic choices make the novel a difficult one to navigate, particularly for a middle-grade audience. Letters between Lena and Keda (both handwritten and in the form of Tumblr posts) and sporadic free-verse chapters break up Keda’s first-person account, but the latter have an arbitrary rather than organic feel. On a sentence level, Lockington has such an aversion to commas that dialogue tags appear not to be attached to the speech they reference; asides, addresses, and appositives feel jumbled inside sentences; and list items aren’t separated. An overreliance on sentence fragments causes them to lose any dramatic effect. From a characterization standpoint, aside from family members, too many others come across as straw men, walking onstage to hurl a racist slur and then vanishing from the narrative.
The myriad themes explored are compelling, but the execution gets in the way. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: July 30, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-374-30804-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This middle-grade read is heartfelt, but nostalgia that’s a bit too on the nose makes it hard to follow
Twelve-year-old aspiring astronaut Ebony-Grace Norfleet Freeman is lonely and homesick in New York.
When trouble hits her family like an asteroid, Ebony-Grace, aka Cadet E-Grace Starfleet, is forced to leave her beloved grandfather and her hometown of Huntsville, Alabama, to spend a week with her father in Harlem, New York—or as she calls it, “No Joke City.” Determined to ignore what she calls the “Sonic Boom,” New York’s hip-hop revolution in the early 1980s, Ebony-Grace rejects the people, music, and movements of Harlem, instead blasting off in her mind aboard the Mothership Uhura to save her grandfather, Capt. Fleet. Stuck, Ebony-Grace works to navigate a new frontier where she is teased and called “crazy” because of her imaginative intergalactic adventures. Ostracized as a flava-less, “plain ol’ ice cream sandwich! Chocolate on the outside, vanilla on the inside,” Ebony-Grace tries her best to be “regular and normal,” but her outer-space imaginings are the only things that keep her grounded. The design includes images that sho nuff bring the ’80s alive: comic-strip panels, inverted Star Wars scripting, and onomatopoeic graffiti-esque words. Unfortunately, these serve to interrupt an already-crowded narrative as readers hyperjump between Ebony-Grace’s imagination and the movement of life in the real world, transmitted via news reports and subway memorials.
This middle-grade read is heartfelt, but nostalgia that’s a bit too on the nose makes it hard to follow . (Historical fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-399-18735-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 7, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
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