Bosse (Deep Dream of the Rain Forest, 1993, etc.) continues his series of vivid works of historical fiction in this story of two brothers traveling across Ming Dynasty China to pursue their destinies. Lao Chen is a young Confucian scholar headed for the ultimate glory of the palace examination and top-level civil service; Lao Hong, loyal and worldly younger brother, is determined to escort Chen to Beijing and the highest honors. Through his cunning, Hong acquires enough money to get the two brothers to Chengdu for the provincial examination, which Chen passes easily. From there they must travel the long and treacherous road to Beijing—over the Yellow River, through drought- plagued provinces—for the next stage of the test. In addition, each brother is carrying a secret missive—Chen's from his teacher for an ostracized inventor, and Hong's from one member of the subversive White Lotus society to another. The brothers are separated when their junk is captured by pirates, who discover Hong's letter and torture him to discover its meaning, but Hong escapes, finds Chen, and the brothers continue on their way. When Chen passes the municipal and then the palace examination, his future is secure, and Hong is finally free to seek his own fortune through a career in the military. Bosse renders a graphic picture of 16th-century China- -its violence, ceremony, scholarship, and strict class order—in this stimulating and timeless story. (Fiction. YA)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-374-32234-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Told in free verse with multiple voices, this novel dramatically recreates the impact of the historic tragedy of the Johnstown, Pa., flood on the lives of six people from 1888 to 1889. At the heart of the story is Celestia’s love for Peter, an illicit romance between a young girl of high society and the resort’s hired boy, which her father forbids. To save the family’s reputation, her father arranges to send her to Switzerland with her aunt, but when it’s discovered that Celestia’s pretty, engaged sister is pregnant, Estrella is sent instead. When the dam literally bursts, the tsunami is both physical and emotional, uprooting all their lives, including those of Maura, the wife of a railroad conductor, and Kate, a trained nurse scarred by the drowning of her beloved. As the three rivers converge, so do the lives of the characters in their efforts to survive. With an atmosphere like that of Jennifer Donnelly’s A Northern Light (2003) and skilled wordsmithing akin to Jen Bryant’s, the staccato pulsing of this love story builds the tension and puts human faces on a devastating disaster. (author’s note, timeline, further reading) (Historical fiction. YA)
Pub Date: April 13, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-375-85885-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2010
A flawed, but engrossing novel about the only daughter of the author of the Divine Comedy, who made Italian a language for poets. It’s easy to list its flaws: it’s overlong; it’s written in a sometimes awkward first person; it covers too much ground as Antonia, called Bice, recounts her life from Florence in 1301 when she is a tiny child to Ravenna in 1350. It covers the last 30 years in two pages. However, Bice is the intelligent and difficult child of intelligent and difficult parents: readers see her travels to Paris and to Siena. They see her mother’s struggles to preserve the family fortunes as her father wrote and chose political activism, often on the “wrong” side. Bice learns to read, to draw, to prepare vellum, and to illuminate. The wrenching labor involved in 14th-century life is a given, and Heuston limns it well. Historians know only that Dante had a daughter who lived with him the last years of his life and became a nun at the end of hers. Heuston has made a vivid embroidery of the rest. (Historical fiction. YA)
Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2003
ISBN: 1-886910-97-9
Page Count: 307
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
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