The sheltered daughter of a wealthy merchant flees Roman forces and strikes out on her own in this invigorating historical adventure. Sara bih-Hanno and her father, a senator in the ancient Tunisian city of Carthage, have mere moments to absorb the news of her brother’s battlefield death before they must quit their home and the city via the Heron, a cargo ship. Skirmishing with other vessels, they gain several additions to their party, including a Roman soldier they take prisoner, who both intrigues and frustrates Sara. Lawrence imbues Sara’s first-person narration with intelligence and her character with a wry stubbornness, realistically portraying her fear and accompanying resolve to plow through it. Especially well imagined is the metacognition she possesses about her manipulation of the men to whom she must entrust her fate. A map and a glossary of nautical terms assist, though don’t completely succeed, in making sense of the at-times laboriously detailed combat scenes. Although the end is abrupt, it will also give readers cause to hope for a sequel. (Historical fiction. 12 & up)
Pub Date: April 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8234-2217-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2009
Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch.
A Jewish girl joins up with Polish resistance groups to fight for her people against the evils of the Holocaust.
Chaya Lindner is forcibly separated from her family when they are consigned to the Jewish ghetto in Krakow. The 16-year-old is taken in by the leaders of Akiva, a fledgling Jewish resistance group that offers her the opportunity to become a courier, using her fair coloring to pass for Polish and sneak into ghettos to smuggle in supplies and information. Chaya’s missions quickly become more dangerous, taking her on a perilous journey from a disastrous mission in Krakow to the ghastly ghetto of Lodz and eventually to Warsaw to aid the Jews there in their gathering uprising inside the walls of the ghetto. Through it all, she is partnered with a secretive young girl whom she is reluctant to trust. The trajectory of the narrative skews toward the sensational, highlighting moments of resistance via cinematic action sequences but not pausing to linger on the emotional toll of the Holocaust’s atrocities. Younger readers without sufficient historical knowledge may not appreciate the gravity of the events depicted. The principal characters lack depth, and their actions and the situations they find themselves in often require too much suspension of disbelief to pass for realism.
Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch. (afterword) (Historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-338-14847-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
“Imagine an age when there were still people around who’d seen U.S. Grant with their own eyes, and men who’d voted for Lincoln.” Fifteen-year-old Howard Leland Hutchings visits his father’s family in Grand Tower, Illinois, in 1916, and meets four old people who raised his father. The only thing he knows about them is that they lived through the Civil War. Grandma Tilly, slender as a girl but with a face “wrinkled like a walnut,” tells Howard their story. Sitting up on the Devil’s Backbone overlooking the Mississippi River, she “handed over the past like a parcel.” It’s a story of two mysterious women from New Orleans, of ghosts, soldiers, and seers, of quadroons, racism, time, and the river. Peck writes beautifully, bringing history alive through Tilly’s marvelous voice and deftly handling themes of family, race, war, and history. A rich tale full of magic, mystery, and surprise. (author’s note) (Fiction. 12+)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-8037-2735-6
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2003
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