Jessica Baron is a smart and likeable British teen who leaps at the chance to join the crew of the first children's moon landing. Although Jessica frequently drops Anglicanisms (``beavering,'' ``fifteen stone,'') readers will find it easy to like her excitement and honesty. The entire enterprise, including the financing of the Apollo rocket, is paid for by the wealthy and of course eccentric Lady ``Mad'' Muriel Dumfries, who now wants to see the lunar surface up close. Even though the rest of the youthful crew includes a six-year-old, their preparation is rigorous: This is the most satisfying section of the novel, partly because Simpson has stuffed it full of facts and realistic scenarios drawn from NASA's astronaut training program. The usual last minute glitch threatens to scrap the missionMuriel's daughters try to have her declared crazybut the launch proceeds as planned. No sooner does the Adventurer reach orbit, however, than it's pulled off-course by a black hole, and shot 300 years into the future, to an Earth that has been ravaged by the depletion of its ozone layer. The plot metamorphoses from morality tale to spiritual primer: After travelling to Saturn's moon, Titan, the gang meets Yogi Shantih Baba, who explains that their experience has been a lesson in eternity, and then transports them back through time and space to the Earth's moon. This deus-ex-machina conclusion seems fitting for this unlikely, incredible adventure, which loses its excitement and any realism just when the fun should really begin. (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-7914-2629-7
Page Count: 221
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
In the new Success series, a history of the Navajo Arts and Crafts Enterprise (NACE), a tribal cooperative founded in 1975 to encourage Navajo silversmiths, weavers, and other craftsmen. Trahant intersperses the story of the cooperative's growth with biographical sketches and interviews of the Native Americans who work in the business: craftsmen, buyers, store managers, accountants, sales clerks, and publicists. Although these are interesting pieces, they interrupt the flow of the historical narrative, which often resembles an annual report. The book achieves its modest goal of showing positive role models for others of Native American ancestry, a goal which Roessel sets out in the introductory comments: ``I am tired of outsiders stepping into my community and supposedly telling `our story.' It is time that Navajos tell their own story.'' Add this to the shelves on contemporary Native American culture; it may also be of limited use in the business section. (b&w photos, index, not seen, appendix, glossary) (Nonfiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: March 15, 1996
ISBN: 0-8027-8336-8
Page Count: 73
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1996
The bland, uninvolving story of Sipho, 12, who flees his drunken stepfather's brutality to live on the streets of Johannesburg. Sipho finds a gang of street children but is with them barely a week before Danny Lewis, a white shopkeeper, offers him steady work, paid for with new clothes, regular meals, and a room of his own. What Lewis does not offer is respect; that and his sullen son's antagonism soon drive Sipho back to the streets for one night, after which he settles in with his friend, Jabu, in a children's shelter. Not only is Sipho always able to find help with relative ease, but he encounters more discomfort than danger on the street: A botched experiment with glue-sniffing leaves him feeling ill; a midnight roundup by disguised police ends with a cold but anticlimactic dunk in a lake; food, money, even soap and water are not difficult to come by; incidents of violence and predation are implied, anecdotal, or offstage. The plot doesn't develop but proceeds until it stops, trailing off after a vaguely described peace rally and a brief visit home. Naidoo, with the acknowledged help of a corps of contemporary observers, effectively captures the mixed feelings with which South Africans are viewing the changes rapidly taking place in their country, but the story lacks the fire that made Journey to Jo'burg (1985) so compelling. (glossary) (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1997
ISBN: 0-06-027505-7
Page Count: 189
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1996
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