An outstanding tale that approaches issues of self-doubt, rejection, and acceptance with sensitivity, warmth, and an...
In this novel for older elementary school children, a fifth-grader’s determination to shine at roller skating becomes entangled in her concerns about her height, family, and best friend’s shifting loyalties.
Ten-year-old Tillie Watkins worries about her absent mother, short stature, and peculiar home with her eccentric uncle in a piano factory–turned–artists’ colony (it accommodates “ten artists plus one kid”). Her insecurities over being different are magnified when her best friend, Shanelle, deserts her for Glory Peterson, a cool new girl in school. If Tillie can only prove herself in an upcoming roller skating skate-a-thon, maybe Mama will come back and everything else will fall into place. (Tillie’s “guilty wish” is “that I could have a regular car and a regular house with a mom and a dad and a dog sleeping on the porch.”) Author and poet Atkinson (Owl Girl, 2016, etc.) gives the book’s setting and characters notable authenticity. Readers gradually understand that Tillie’s mother has been in and out of treatment due to substance abuse and largely absent from her daughter’s life. Yet Tillie hangs on to an idealized portrait of Mama, imagining loving conversations with her and wanting to make her proud so that she will come back to stay. Tillie’s realization that others—including a brilliant little second-grader whom she tutors and even Glory—may live with difficult challenges, too, emerges gradually and without preachiness. Tillie’s pride in her odd home and the people in it also develops slowly and effectively. When her affectionate and protective Uncle Fred helps her understand that she has nothing to do with Mama’s unreliability, it is a moving moment of truth. Atkinson’s message of reassurance and confidence-building—children aren’t responsible for their parents’ flaws; they are worthy of being loved for who they are—is an organic part of a warm and lively narrative told through a young girl’s thoughts, actions, and growing comprehension of her world and those around her.
An outstanding tale that approaches issues of self-doubt, rejection, and acceptance with sensitivity, warmth, and an engagingly realistic voice.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-1-63381-108-9
Page Count: 155
Publisher: Maine Authors Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An entrancing book of poetry.
Ungar’s (English/Coll. of Saint Rose; The Origin of the Milky Way, 2007, etc.) new collection may not make her immortal, but it surely establishes her as a contemporary poet of the first rank.
This poetry collection is like a bowl of fruit and cream: it’s so delicious, and it all goes down so easily, that you forget how much nutrition is there. She’s also the rare talent who can take nearly anything and make it into poetry. Everything is ore for her refinery, and she pulls inspiration from numerous and sundry sources, from the natural world to mystical Judaism to an exercise class for the elderly to a student’s essay. (The author is a writing professor.) This last source fuels “On a Student Paper Comparing Emily Dickinson to Lady Gaga,” a poem that no one should ever have tried to write—and that Ungar turns to gold. This clever piece demonstrates the author’s slow turn from skeptical distance to full acceptance of her young author’s thesis; it concludes, “Should I google Lady Gaga? / Or just give the girl an A.” This collection is full of such unlikely experiments—all of which the author pulls off with easy grace. Two poems with “Medusa” in their titles show her admirable dexterity with symbols. The first, “Call Me Medusa,” takes the snake-haired sorceress as a metaphor for the author herself: “I was a brain, eyes and hair. / If not a beauty, are you then a monster? / Some say I was beautiful, raped, punished / for it, then beheaded in a rear-view mirror. / Even cut off, my head could still turn men / to stone.” The second, a poem that gives the collection its title, compares tiny jellyfish to the same mythic figure: “Tentacles resorb, / umbrella reverts, / medusa reattaches / to the ocean floor / and grows a new / colony of polyps / that bud into / identical medusae, / bypassing death.” Thus, Medusa is human and other, dead and deathless, beautiful and terrible and strange.
An entrancing book of poetry.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-915380-93-0
Page Count: 98
Publisher: The Word Works
Review Posted Online: Aug. 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.
In Matvejs’ novel, a performer with a traveling circus in the Australian Outback tries to keep her family together in the face of intimidating difficulties.
Rose Vitkovskis loves her life in the circus, despite all its hardships: little money, a sleazy boss pressuring her for sex, constant travel through dusty, dying mining towns, bad weather, etc. Mother of five, she also cares for her much older husband, who has dementia, though she’s in love with a married circus clown. It’s all worth it once she gets in the ring, where she performs on the Spanish web and shows off her trained animals. But when a severe storm scatters the troupe, Rose must rise to a new set of challenges. Though Rose continually refers to the wonder and magic of her profession—her “one passion,” per the title—no book could better cure the reader of a desire to run away and join the circus. Its marvels are asserted but thinly described; instead, the book devotes space to supposedly funny episodes involving a quantity and variety of excrement that readers might not believe possible. Toilets, farts, urine, vomit; feces from human, pig, parrot, horse, goose, monkey, dog; the senile old lady repeating “Piss…piss…piss” and “Chamber pot!”—it never ends. When not playing for laughs, it’s for humiliation, as when Rose is made to scrub some filthy toilets while wearing her circus costume in view of laughing local teenagers. Leaving aside bodily waste, it’s also disturbing to see Rose enjoying her sexual exploitation as she responds to her boss’ “ultimate dominance.” The disgusting elements make it more than a little difficult to buy high-flown statements about wonder and magic and how the real world is a nothing but a jail. Similarly, it’s difficult to buy into the thwarted romance between Rose and Freddy, a circus clown. “It’s the circus that protects our love, isn’t it?” she says. “Beyond this world around the big top, our love could never be.” There’s no such thing as divorce? More unbelievable yet is Rose’s fate after returning to civilization, which involves a naked wish-fulfillment fantasy about her journal being made into a movie.
A flimsy narrative and excessive scatology.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2012
ISBN: 978-1434911261
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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