An ambitious rumination that fails on several fronts.
Morgan’s world is rocked when she discovers that the grandfather whose passing she is grieving was not her biological grandfather; her mother’s long-estranged father is in fact alive in Brooklyn.
Angry at her mother’s deception and anxious about the distance she feels growing between her parents, the privileged 16-year-old becomes obsessed with this new grandfather. She surreptitiously travels from Princeton to Brooklyn, becoming friends with Clover, an old woman who mediates this newfound relationship. Both Clover and her mother hint darkly at her grandmother’s reasons for leaving her husband, and even Morgan finds herself hesitant to trust the man. Her best friends, Ansel and Sarah, also warn her about pursuing the relationship, but Morgan persists even as she finds herself falling for Ansel—who seems ready to reciprocate. McGuigan tries to pack a lot into this slim novel: class consciousness, a child’s passage into adulthood, the complexities of relationships, and the difficulty of leaving past misdeeds behind. It stutters and stops, shifting modes abruptly and never fully cohering. The temporal setting is frustratingly indistinct. Though Morgan carries a cellphone, she and her friends never text one another, and they seem quaintly dependent on landlines; the gritty Brooklyn Morgan bravely explores is a far cry from the gentrified borough it’s become. Troublingly, a subplot about the sexual past Morgan is deeply ashamed of is never resolved or even mitigated.
An ambitious rumination that fails on several fronts. (Fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4405-8463-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Merit Press
Review Posted Online: April 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Emotionally resonant and not without humor, this impressive debut about survival and connection, resourcefulness and...
Two girls on the racial margins of mid-19th-century America team up and head west.
As the book opens, Samantha, a 15-year-old Chinese-American violinist, yearns to move back to New York City in 1849, though her kind and optimistic father, owner of a dry goods store in the bustling outpost of Saint Joe, Missouri, has great plans for them in California. When the store burns down and her father dies, she is forced to defend herself from their predatory landlord. Suddenly on the run from the law, Samantha and Annamae, a 16-year-old African-American slave who covets freedom, disguise themselves as boys and head west on the Oregon Trail. Well-crafted and suspenseful, with more flow than ebb to the tension that stretches like taut wires across plotlines, Lee’s tale ingeniously incorporates Chinese philosophy and healing, music, art and religion, as well as issues of race and discrimination (including abolitionist views and examples of cruel slave treatment), into what is at its center a compelling love story. “Sammy” and “Andy” meet up with Cay, West and Peety, three young, good-hearted cowboys with secrets of their own, who help them on their arduous, dangerous journey.
Emotionally resonant and not without humor, this impressive debut about survival and connection, resourcefulness and perseverance will keep readers on the very edges of their seats. (Historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: March 17, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-399-16803-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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