In his first children's book to be published here, a well- regarded New Zealand novelist sets a story about four children bringing a pyromaniac to justice early in WW I. From its riveting first chapter—from the point of view of the lumbering masked man who sets fire to the local livery stable because ``a time had come when his fire must consume life''—the action is compelling. Noel and Kitty Wix sound the alarm in time to save the horses; knocked down by the man as he makes a hasty exit, Kitty soon realizes that he is Edgar Marwick, a reclusive, belligerent farmer. Meanwhile, Kitty's new friend is the mayor's overprotected but spunky daughter, Irene; and Noel makes an uneasy alliance with rough but intelligent Phil. Cleverly (and with a daring lack of caution), the four unearth evidence proving Marwick's guilt; meanwhile, they are involved in a jingoistic school pageant (its destructive aftermath is exacerbated by Marwick's support of local rowdies). Other subplots—a romance between their gifted, unfashionably pacifist teacher and a German-born music teacher; Phil's chance for an education—are deftly integrated. Several adult characters are as perceptively drawn as the well-realized protagonists; Marwick's madness is revealed to be the result of his mother's response to a long-ago tragedy. A well-wrought thriller that brings an entire community vividly and believably to life. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-395-62428-2
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1992
Jason's family is making their ``third move in five years''; once again, Jason says good-bye to his friends and packs his belongings. Meanwhile, he finds comfort up in a dogwood tree. It listens to his worries and even answers, and when it's time to leave an old Ilana Davita Chandal is the New York-born daughter of Michael and Anne, both Communists of the Thirties. Michael is a Maine native and newspaper writer; Anne (once Channah) is a brilliant ideologue with a bitter European-Jewish past(her rabbi-father's paternal neglect, pogroms); they are atheistic, committed, peripatetic. (Party cell meetings necessitate many moves to different apartments throughout the city.) And, now and again, the Chandals give respectful shelter to an old friend of Anne's from Europe, Jakob Daw, a tubercular writer of political allegories. As liana Davita grows up, then, Daw introduces her to the widened-out perimeters of the imagination. Meanwhile, David Dinn—a Jewish boy living next door to the Chandals at the Seagate beach one summer—introduces her to an almost opposite world: the strange, beguiling forms of religious observance. So, while her father goes to Spain to cover the Civil War, Ilana Davita begins to attend a local synagogue on Saturdays (against her mother's wishes); then her father is killed at Guernica—and mother Anne loses her political faith with the Stalin/Hitler pact. There's still more loss ahead: Jakob Daw, deported from refuge in the US because of his politics, dies in France. And eventually Ilana Davita and her mother—both cast adrift—come ever closer into the orbit of consolation that religion can provide: Anne nurses Michael's devoutly Christian sister Sarah; Ilana Davita enrolls in a yeshiva; later Anne marries David Dinn's father, an immigration lawyer she knew from Europe, an Orthodox Jew who tried to help with Jakob Daw's fight to remain in the country. Thus, the reclamation of Jewish heritage is complete at last—Yet Potok refuses to end the novel on this uplifting note. Instead, the theme of justice rises at the finale—as Ilana Davita, a crack student at the yeshiva, finds herself discriminated against because of her sex: Potok seems to be arguing both for sexual equality in Judaic practice and for a more liberal Torah hermeneutics, involving allegory and imagination. As in The Book o Lights, Potok's themes in this long novel are developed slowly, sometimes repetitiously often undramatically; Ilana Davita's narration, which has a somewhat YA-ish quality, tends to underline each point rather too heavily. Still, despite the faulty pacing, the ideas here are rich, provocative, thickly interesting: the soul's desire for a sustainable faith, the tension between political, worldly justice and religious, spiritual justice. And, for readers who've been happy to settle down and tackle Potok's previous ventures into philosophical fiction, this will not be a disappointment.gardener gives him a sapling that promises similar comfort in his future home. Stagily wistful, overwritten, long, and punctuated with pointless scenes, this well-known novelist's first children's story has little to recommend it. Auth captures some of the atmosphere that goes with any big childhood change, but can't compensate for the story's unwieldiness and inconsistencies. At one point, the mother's ``sacrifice'' for the move is that she'll give up her travel-agency job. That idea is dropped, and readers are given a scene of her at her parents' graves: ``It's hard for me to leave them.'' It would be, if there were any emotional authenticity within these pages—but there's not. Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: March 11, 1985
ISBN: 0449911837
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 6, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1985
Parker’s not trying to be Dostoevsky here but rather wishes to create light and good-natured entertainment—and he succeeds.
Parker zings—but oh so gently—small-town politics and the pretentious politicians who regulate our lives at the micro-level.
The Committee on Town Happiness is happy indeed to make our happy lives even happier, and to this end its members vote on a constant stream of issues reflecting their concerns. This slim novel contains almost 100 chapters, and in about two-thirds of them a vote is taken on something or other. For example, the committee passes by acclamation a testimonial that “trees demonstrate steadiness of purpose and evenness of demeanor.” When things start to heat up on a controversial topic, the committee votes 5-3 “to destroy the minutes upon adjourning” (though one wag of a committeeman wonders whether "the minutes say destroy the minutes"). The primary goal of the committee is right in its name, but the members run into an obvious dilemma: How does one quantify and measure happiness? They do their best by passing legislation meant to materially increase the well-being of the community as a whole. Such ordinances include the regulation of writing on biking jerseys: “No vulgarities may be printed in sans serif fonts on jerseys; no vulgarities may be written backwards, to be read in rear view mirrors.” When citizens start disappearing, there's concern (and the launching of hot air balloons to find them), and occasionally some slight chicanery interrupts the committee's good intentions, but the plot remains minimal.
Parker’s not trying to be Dostoevsky here but rather wishes to create light and good-natured entertainment—and he succeeds.Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-938103-80-3
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Dzanc
Review Posted Online: March 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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