In the unforgiving terrain of eastern Oregon in the first decade of the 20th century, 12-year-old John Nolan (known to his family as “Wart”) has been given a difficult, maybe even impossible job by his father. Because his mother is about to give birth, making it impossible for Wart’s father to leave the family farm, it is up to Wart to find a group of runaway horses led by the temperamental and headstrong Ol’ Rosie. Wart’s father, gruff and uncommunicative, expects a great deal from his oldest son, leaving Wart feeling that whatever he does isn’t good enough. Wart sets off before dawn and spends the day scouring the area around the farm, but with no luck. The next day, with his father’s imaginary voice alternately chiding and encouraging him, Wart, amazingly, does manage to find the horses and get them home, but not before Ol’ Rosie has taken on a cougar and killed it, and then bolted for her freedom, a freedom that Wart doesn’t begrudge her. After Wart’s dangerous expedition, he is beginning to see things differently. “I’ve always thought of Pa as a real big man. . . . Hard as the rimrocks, strong as the biggest horse. But now all at once I saw that he isn’t all that tall. . . . Maybe he isn’t that hard, either, or that strong. . . .” Intermittently interesting, but generally slow-moving, despite the adventurous nature of Wart’s journey, this novel all too deliberately sets out to show that this experience is a life-changing, fear-conquering, coming-of-age event for Wart. At least Wart offers a dissenting point of view to the hundreds of children’s books that sing the praises of that oh-so-noble beast, the horse. Wart doesn’t like them. “You don’t get a whole lot of sympathy from a horse. A horse will kick you, and then when you’re lying there on the ground—in a pile of manure—he will walk on you before you can get up.” Not as powerful as Moeri’s earlier Save Queen of Sheba (1981) or as action-packed as Gary Paulsen’s The Haymeadow (1992), nevertheless this will appeal to readers who’ve enjoyed both. (Fiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-689-82614-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
Bishop’s spectacular photographs of the tiny red-eyed tree frog defeat an incidental text from Cowley (Singing Down the Rain, 1997, etc.). The frog, only two inches long, is enormous in this title; it appears along with other nocturnal residents of the rain forests of Central America, including the iguana, ant, katydid, caterpillar, and moth. In a final section, Cowley explains how small the frog is and aspects of its life cycle. The main text, however, is an afterthought to dramatic events in the photos, e.g., “But the red-eyed tree frog has been asleep all day. It wakes up hungry. What will it eat? Here is an iguana. Frogs do not eat iguanas.” Accompanying an astonishing photograph of the tree frog leaping away from a boa snake are three lines (“The snake flicks its tongue. It tastes frog in the air. Look out, frog!”) that neither advance nor complement the action. The layout employs pale and deep green pages and typeface, and large jewel-like photographs in which green and red dominate. The combination of such visually sophisticated pages and simplistic captions make this a top-heavy, unsatisfying title. (Picture book. 7-9)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-87175-7
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
Themes of freedom and responsibility twine between the lines of this short but heavy novel from the author of Because of Winn-Dixie (2000). Three months after his mother's death, Rob and his father are living in a small-town Florida motel, each nursing sharp, private pain. On the same day Rob has two astonishing encounters: first, he stumbles upon a caged tiger in the woods behind the motel; then he meets Sistine, a new classmate responding to her parents' breakup with ready fists and a big chip on her shoulder. About to burst with his secret, Rob confides in Sistine, who instantly declares that the tiger must be freed. As Rob quickly develops a yen for Sistine's company that gives her plenty of emotional leverage, and the keys to the cage almost literally drop into his hands, credible plotting plainly takes a back seat to character delineation here. And both struggle for visibility beneath a wagonload of symbol and metaphor: the real tiger (and the inevitable recitation of Blake's poem); the cage; Rob's dream of Sistine riding away on the beast's back; a mysterious skin condition on Rob's legs that develops after his mother's death; a series of wooden figurines that he whittles; a larger-than-life African-American housekeeper at the motel who dispenses wisdom with nearly every utterance; and the climax itself, which is signaled from the start. It's all so freighted with layers of significance that, like Lois Lowry's Gathering Blue (2000), Anne Mazer's Oxboy (1995), or, further back, Julia Cunningham's Dorp Dead (1965), it becomes more an exercise in analysis than a living, breathing story. Still, the tiger, "burning bright" with magnificent, feral presence, does make an arresting central image. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7636-0911-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK TO SCREEN
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