Both poignant and hopeful, a beautifully calibrated coming-of-age tale that deals thoughtfully with grief and recovery.
In this debut middle-grade novel, a girl learns at summer camp that she has an unusual ability, which may help in hunting for her brother.
On the way to Camp Glynwood for the summer, Celia Johnson, 11, is already working out the details of how she’ll return to Brooklyn. She has no intention of enjoying four weeks in the woods while her younger brother, Kyel, is missing. True, camp isn’t as bad as she feared; the girls come in every complexion, including her own “dark hot chocolate” shade, and the place feels “loved and worn…like her favorite Brooklyn Dodgers sweatshirt,” once Kyel’s. She even makes tentative friends with a quirky blond girl, Violet, whose father has died. Nevertheless, on her first night, Celia escapes, but crash-lands her borrowed bicycle in the woods, where she makes an incredible discovery: She can talk to animals. Some of them think they can help with Celia’s search, but she must stay at camp and arrange to visit the Snapping Turtle King. He has a certain gift that could aid Celia, but has been driven insane by grief, blaming another long-ago “Speaker” for the death of his wife. Celia, meanwhile, must face an important truth and several difficulties before she can carry out some crucial tasks—with unexpected assistance from several camp figures—and restore the balance of several lives. In her novel, Hales writes with sensitivity about loss, using well-honed images. Violet’s laugh, for example, “made Celia think of a flash of tinsel catching the sunlight from a grey, winter sidewalk. There was a sharp crispness wrapped in sadness that Celia understood.” Animals and people are deftly characterized, and the author does a nice job of capturing the atmosphere of a good summer camp: its activities, traditions, in-jokes, and sensory feel. Celia’s psychological growth from denial to acceptance of loss is artfully and realistically handled, despite the book’s fantasy aspects, which work well as a kind of drama taking place in a symbolic landscape.
Both poignant and hopeful, a beautifully calibrated coming-of-age tale that deals thoughtfully with grief and recovery.Pub Date: May 28, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-73304-940-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Kurti Publishing
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.
Coelho is a Brazilian writer with four books to his credit. Following Diary of a Magus (1992—not reviewed) came this book, published in Brazil in 1988: it's an interdenominational, transcendental, inspirational fable—in other words, a bag of wind.
The story is about a youth empowered to follow his dream. Santiago is an Andalusian shepherd boy who learns through a dream of a treasure in the Egyptian pyramids. An old man, the king of Salem, the first of various spiritual guides, tells the boy that he has discovered his destiny: "to realize one's destiny is a person's only real obligation." So Santiago sells his sheep, sails to Tangier, is tricked out of his money, regains it through hard work, crosses the desert with a caravan, stops at an oasis long enough to fall in love, escapes from warring tribesmen by performing a miracle, reaches the pyramids, and eventually gets both the gold and the girl. Along the way he meets an Englishman who describes the Soul of the World; the desert woman Fatima, who teaches him the Language of the World; and an alchemist who says, "Listen to your heart" A message clings like ivy to every encounter; everyone, but everyone, has to put in their two cents' worth, from the crystal merchant to the camel driver ("concentrate always on the present, you'll be a happy man"). The absence of characterization and overall blandness suggest authorship by a committee of self-improvement pundits—a far cry from Saint- Exupery's The Little Prince: that flagship of the genre was a genuine charmer because it clearly derived from a quirky, individual sensibility.
Coelho's placebo has racked up impressive sales in Brazil and Europe. Americans should flock to it like gulls.Pub Date: July 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-250217-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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