Set in the harsh and unforgiving environment of 15th-century Greenland, this is a story of two people from vastly different cultures coming to love and depend on each other. Navarana is hunting a polar bear during what should have been Greenland’s summer. But for the past three years, the summer weather has been as brutal as winter, leaving the “Human Beings” (native Greenlanders) starving, fighting among themselves, and wondering what they’ve done to deserve such a severe punishment. Spotting the bear near an abandoned settlement of “strangers” (Europeans), Navarana ventures into the settlement and kills the bear. As she is sheltering in the abandoned village, she wanders into a church and finds a young man, little older than herself, who has somehow survived whatever has killed the rest of the village’s population. Brendan, a monk originally from Ireland, had answered the Pope’s entreaty for priests and monks to save “the Holy Church’s farthest outpost.” Navarana rescues him, bringing him back to her settlement and back to life. She resents Brendan, who has become her responsibility, and yet she’s intrigued by him. Brendan also feels mixed emotions about his rescuer—he hates that Navarana pities him and hates that he is totally dependent on her for his survival, leaving him feeling humiliated and emasculated. Despite embracing much of the Greenlanders’ way of life, Brendan remains committed to Christianity, although he feels he was ill-prepared by the Church, which told him that the heathens were literally monsters who would show only gratitude to the monks for bringing them salvation. He never expected them to be real people with beliefs of their own that meant as much to them as his own did to him. One night, Brendan and Nava sleep together (or as the author delicately puts it, they “melted together”) and realize that they love each other and are meant to spend the rest of their lives together. While the story dollops out big servings of Inuit mysticism and spirituality that often verges on the trite, and has language that is too often stilted, passages that are overly wordy, and a sometimes confusing plot, there is definitely something intriguing and fascinating in watching these two characters learn to accept and love each other. (Fiction. YA)
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2000
ISBN: 0-374-37752-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Abandoned by their mother, whose mental stability has been crumbling since her husband went west, Lyddie and her brother Charlie manage alone through a Vermont winter. But in the spring of 1844, without consulting them, the mother apprentices Charlie to a miller and hires Lyddie out to a tavern, where she is little better than a slave. Still, Lyddie is strong and indomitable, and the cook is friendly even if the mistress is cold and stern; Lyddie manages well enough until a run-in with the mistress sends her south to work in the mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, thus earning a better wage (in a vain hope of saving the family farm), making friends among the other girls enduring the long hours and dangerous conditions, and expanding her understanding of loyalty, generosity, and injustice (she already knows more than most people ever learn about perseverance). Knowing only her own troubled family, Lyddie is unusually reserved, even for a New Englander, With her usual discernment and consummate skill, Paterson depicts her gradually turning toward the warmth of others' kindnesses—Betsy reads Oliver Twist aloud and suggests the ultimate goal of Oberlin College; Diana teaches Lyddie to cope in the mill, setting an example that Lyddie later follows with an Irish girl who is even more naive than she had been; Quaker neighbors offer help and solace that Lyddie at first rejects out of hand. Deftly plotted and rich in incident, a well-researched picture of the period—and a memorable portrait of an untutored but intelligent young woman making her way against fierce odds.
Pub Date: March 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-525-67338-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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