A melodramatic foray into an extremely fictional ancient Rome. Twelve-year-old Aurelia is the daughter of Caesar, ruler of Rome around the third century. He presents her with a tiger cub, defanged and with claws trimmed, and Julius, the slave who trains and cares for him. She doesn’t know that the cub has a littermate, kept bullied and hungry for the games at the Colosseum. Although the details of Roman life seem to be historically accurate, the tone is completely wrong. The animals are anthropomorphized to a fare-thee-well (think the recent movie novelization Two Brothers); Aurelia’s distaste for the bloodshed of the games, both animal and human, and her interest in the persecuted Christians seem forced; and the actions of the slave Julius, who loves Aurelia, are simply not believable for that place and time. The climax finds Julius facing both the tame and wild tiger brothers in the Colosseum—and everyone lives. A much better journey into this era would be Caroline Lawrence’s Roman Mysteries series. (Historical fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: June 14, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-73240-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A lovely story, rendered in spare prose by a major writer of historical fiction, Rinaldi’s (Girl in Blue, 2001, etc.) tale takes place in Georgia in 1864. Written in first-person flashback as a plainly told narrative set down at the request of Clara Barton, the main character tells us, it describes 13-year-old Eulinda Kellogg’s attempts to make herself “come true.” Eulinda, a house slave at a plantation close to the infamous Andersonville prison camp for Union soldiers, is the daughter of the plantation’s owner. Though this fact is known to all, including the master’s mean-spirited second wife, the owner has never legally acknowledged Eulinda. Her older brother has run away to join the Union forces—and may, in fact, be imprisoned at Andersonville—and a beloved younger one has been sold. A chance meeting with a man who offers her a role in helping to set the horrors of Andersonville to rights—that is, to bury the Union dead honorably and to turn it into a monument—provides Eulinda with the chance to do something important and meaningful with her life. There is much hard work to be done in this effort, and Eulinda encourages other freed blacks to help her clean and rebuild the place; in addition, as an educated young woman, she paints epitaphs so that all the fallen may be properly memorialized. In the process, she comes to meet and become secretary to Clara Barton, renowned in real life by this time as a champion of the rights of freed slaves and of the effort to pay tribute to the soldiers treated horribly at Andersonville. Eulinda is a beautifully realized character. She speaks plainly but always from the heart, and readers will be swept along by the drama and the history. The author provides a fascinating afterword in which she sets the facts and the many real-life characters in the novel in context and includes a bibliography featuring titles about Barton, Andersonville, and the Civil War. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7868-0533-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Disney-Jump at the Sun
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
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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