It’s 1859 and Gilly (Mary Gillian) Bucket, 11, must leave Missouri to live with her cold and formal aunt in Virginia. The Virginia family holds slaves and Gilly has been raised to shun human bondage. Gilly’s cousin, her only sympathetic relative, is engaged to a neighbor, a yankee who is handsome, charming, and a successful scientific farmer who does not own slaves. But mysteries abound: What is that light in her aunt’s herb room? Does her New Yorker neighbor help slaves escape? Gilly embodies a maelstrom of emotions, struggling to work out a way to find her father who is searching for gold in the faraway Rockies after losing the family money as well as to come to grips with the reality of the life of the slaves and the suspicious activity she sometimes encounters. All is not what it seems, however, and the surprises that life holds will be obvious to some readers, but satisfying nonetheless. Stuffing the plot with information about life during this period, it sometimes seems that Dahlberg (Play to the Angel, 2000) wrote the story only to support the details. Still, Gilly is a spirited character, and despite the Hollywood ending, there are small satisfactions in her tale. (Historical fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2002
ISBN: 0-374-31677-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2002
PLB 0-531-33140-7 Ketcham’s first book is based on an allegedly true story of a childhood incident in the life of Johann Sebastian Bach. It starts with a couple of pages regaling the Bach home and all the Johanns in the family, who made their fame through music. After his father’s death, Johann Sebastian goes to live with his brother, Johann Christoph, where he boasts that he is the best organist in the world. Johann Christoph contradicts him: “Old Adam Reincken is the best.” So Johann Sebastian sets out to hear the master himself. In fact, he is humbled to tears, but there is hope that he will be the world’s best organist one day. Johann Sebastian emerges as little more than a brat, Reincken as more of a suggestion than a character. Bush’s illustrations are most transporting when offering details of the landscape, but his protagonist is too impish to give the story much authority. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: March 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-531-30140-0
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Orchard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
Adler (also with Widener, Lou Gehrig, 1997, etc.) sets his fictional story during the week of July 14, 1932, in the Bronx, when the news items that figure in this tale happened. A boy gets a dime for his birthday, instead of the bicycle he longs for, because it is the Great Depression, and everyone who lives in his neighborhood is poor. While helping his friend Jacob sell newspapers, he discovers that his own father, who leaves the house with a briefcase each day, is selling apples on Webster Avenue along with the other unemployed folk. Jacob takes the narrator to Yankee Stadium with the papers, and people don’t want to hear about the Coney Island fire or the boy who stole so he could get something to eat in jail. They want to hear about Babe Ruth and his 25th homer. As days pass, the narrator keeps selling papers, until the astonishing day when Ruth himself buys a paper from the boy with a five-dollar bill and tells him to keep the change. The acrylic paintings bask in the glow of a storied time, where even row houses and the elevated train have a warm, solid presence. The stadium and Webster Avenue are monuments of memory rather than reality in a style that echoes Thomas Hart Benton’s strong color and exaggerated figures. (Picture book. 5-9)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-15-201378-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1999
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