A tiresomely perfect heroine travels back in time in a melodramatic fantasy. When a car accident leaves 14-year-old Allison Blair in a coma, her spirit is sent back to 1906, to occupy the body of poor, downtrodden Becky Lee Thompson. While Becky stays in 1996, keeping Allison’s body alive, Allison must somehow prevent a tragic death—but whose? Her abusive stepmother’s? Joshua, Becky’s boyfriend, with whom Allison is falling in love? The insane daughter of the neighboring wealthy Spanish family? Or Becky’s own? And can she save them before her own body, in the future, dies during brain surgery? This might have been an entertaining thriller if Montes (Egg-napped!, 2001, etc.) hadn’t stretched credulity until it snapped. Allison is brave, resourceful, clever, and (in Becky’s body) beautiful; everybody loves her, as she inspires Joshua to feminism, heals the ailing matriarch with modern medical notions, softens the crusty patriarch, awes the local psychic herbalist, patches up a star-crossed romance, reveals a lost heir, and predicts the San Francisco earthquake. Aside from the latter geological deus ex machina, there is nothing in the setting to indicate turn-of-the-century California. The aristocratic Cardona Pomales family may sprinkle their speech with Spanish, but with their golden tresses and soap opera intrigues might as well be transplanted fairy-tale royalty, while spooky Magda plays the part of the witch in the woods and Joshua is the stereotypical shepherd-prince. For young teens looking for a good romantic cry. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-202626-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A promising debut.
The horrors of the Guatemalan civil war are filtered through the eyes of a boy coming of age.
Set in Chopán in 1981, this verse novel follows the life of Carlos, old enough to feed the chickens but not old enough to wring their necks as the story opens. Carlos’ family and other villagers are introduced in early poems, including Santiago Luc who remembers “a time when there were no soldiers / driving up in jeeps, holding / meetings, making / laws, scattering / bullets into the trees, / hunting guerillas.” On an errand for his mother when soldiers attack, Carlos makes a series of decisions that ultimately save his life but leave him doubting his manliness and bravery. An epilogue of sorts helps tie the main narrative to the present, and the book ends on a hopeful note. In her debut, Brown has chosen an excellent form for exploring the violence and loss of war, but at times, stylistic decisions (most notably attempts at concrete poetry) appear to trump content. While some of the individual poems may be difficult for readers to follow and the frequent references to traditional masculinity may strike some as patriarchal, the use of Spanish is thoughtful, as are references to local flora and fauna. The overall effect is a moving introduction to a subject seldom covered in fiction for youth.
A promising debut. (glossary, author Q&A) (Verse/historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6516-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American...
Crystal-clear prose poems paint a heart-rending picture of 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa’s journey from Seattle to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.
This vividly wrought story of displacement, told from Mina’s first-person perspective, begins as it did for so many Japanese-Americans: with the bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. The backlash of her Seattle community is instantaneous (“Jap, Jap, Jap, the word bounces / around the walls of the hall”), and Mina chronicles its effects on her family with a heavy heart. “I am an American, I scream / in my head, but my mouth is stuffed / with rocks; my body is a stone, like the statue / of a little Buddha Grandpa prays to.” When Roosevelt decrees that West Coast Japanese-Americans are to be imprisoned in inland camps, the Tagawas board up their house, leaving the cat, Grandpa’s roses and Mina’s best friend behind. Following the Tagawas from Washington’s Puyallup Assembly Center to Idaho’s Minidoka Relocation Center (near the titular town of Eden), the narrative continues in poems and letters. In them, injustices such as endless camp lines sit alongside even larger ones, such as the government’s asking interned young men, including Mina’s brother, to fight for America.
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American internment. (historical note) (Verse/historical fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8075-1739-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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