Peggy, who found refuge with her great-aunts during the Irish Potato Famine (Under the Hawthorn Tree, 1990), sets out on her own for America: her sister is to be married, and her brother has found a job, so only 13-year-old Peggy accepts the subsidized passage to Boston. A motherly neighbor provides some assistance during the grueling voyage in steerage, but is detained with cabin fever on arrival. Another friend helps Peggy find lodging with a kind but businesslike fellow immigrant who matches the newly arrived girls with jobs; Peggy's first employer is a horror, but with the second—despite the obliviousness of even a nice upstairs family to downstairs drudgery—she finds a precarious stability and hope for a better future. Here, the brief tenure of a stingy martinet of a housekeeper and the animosity of the family's spoiled teenage daughter provide some suspenseful episodes, but most of the events simply dramatize the Irish immigrant experience. Still, Peggy is likable, other characters are concisely but effectively drawn, and the picture of a young girl making her way in a new land is authentic. (Fiction. 10-15)
Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1992
ISBN: 0-8234-0988-0
Page Count: 174
Publisher: Holiday House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1992
Poignant, respectful, and historically accurate while pulsating with emotional turmoil, adventure, and suspense.
In the midst of political turmoil, how do you escape the only country that you’ve ever known and navigate a new life? Parallel stories of three different middle school–aged refugees—Josef from Nazi Germany in 1938, Isabel from 1994 Cuba, and Mahmoud from 2015 Aleppo—eventually intertwine for maximum impact.
Three countries, three time periods, three brave protagonists. Yet these three refugee odysseys have so much in common. Each traverses a landscape ruled by a dictator and must balance freedom, family, and responsibility. Each initially leaves by boat, struggles between visibility and invisibility, copes with repeated obstacles and heart-wrenching loss, and gains resilience in the process. Each third-person narrative offers an accessible look at migration under duress, in which the behavior of familiar adults changes unpredictably, strangers exploit the vulnerabilities of transients, and circumstances seem driven by random luck. Mahmoud eventually concludes that visibility is best: “See us….Hear us. Help us.” With this book, Gratz accomplishes a feat that is nothing short of brilliant, offering a skillfully wrought narrative laced with global and intergenerational reverberations that signal hope for the future. Excellent for older middle grade and above in classrooms, book groups, and/or communities looking to increase empathy for new and existing arrivals from afar.
Poignant, respectful, and historically accurate while pulsating with emotional turmoil, adventure, and suspense. (maps, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-545-88083-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
PROFILES
An outstanding new edition of this popular modern classic (Newbery Award, 1961), with an introduction by Zena Sutherland and...
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1990
ISBN: 0-395-53680-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
