From England’s Children’s Laureate, a searing WWI-era tale of a close extended family repeatedly struck by adversity and injustice. On vigil in the trenches, 17-year-old Thomas Peaceful looks back at a childhood marked by guilt over his father’s death, anger at the shabby treatment his strong-minded mother receives from the local squire and others—and deep devotion to her, to his brain-damaged brother Big Joe, and especially to his other older brother Charlie, whom he has followed into the army by lying about his age. Weaving telling incidents together, Morpurgo surrounds the Peacefuls with mean-spirited people at home, and devastating wartime experiences on the front, ultimately setting readers up for a final travesty following Charlie’s refusal of an order to abandon his badly wounded brother. Themes and small-town class issues here may find some resonance on this side of the pond, but the particular cultural and historical context will distance the story from American readers—particularly as the pace is deliberate, and the author’s hints about where it’s all heading are too rare and subtle to create much suspense. (Fiction. 11-13, adult)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-439-63648-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
In an intense, well-researched tale that will resonate particularly with readers in parts of the country where the West Nile virus and other insect-borne diseases are active, Anderson (Speak, 1999, etc.) takes a Philadelphia teenager through one of the most devastating outbreaks of yellow fever in our country’s history. It’s 1793, and though business has never been better at the coffeehouse run by Matilda’s widowed, strong-minded mother in what is then the national capital, vague rumors of disease come home to roost when the serving girl dies without warning one August night. Soon church bells are ringing ceaselessly for the dead as panicked residents, amid unrelenting heat and clouds of insects, huddle in their houses, stream out of town, or desperately submit to the conflicting dictates of doctors. Matilda and her mother both collapse, and in the ensuing confusion, they lose track of each other. Witnessing people behaving well and badly, Matilda first recovers slowly in a makeshift hospital, then joins the coffeehouse’s cook, Emma, a free African-American, in tending to the poor and nursing three small, stricken children. When at long last the October frosts signal the epidemic’s end, Emma and Matilda reopen the coffeehouse as partners, and Matilda’s mother turns up—alive, but a trembling shadow of her former self. Like Paul Fleischman’s Path of the Pale Horse (1983), which has the same setting, or Anna Myers’s Graveyard Girl (1995), about a similar epidemic nearly a century later, readers will find this a gripping picture of disease’s devastating effect on people, and on the social fabric itself. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-689-83858-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
Loosely connected to historical events, this tale of a 17th-century English town that isolated itself to prevent the plague from spreading celebrates selfless courage, but it does so at some distance, and within the confines of a contrived, ordinary story. Daughter of a prosperous, bookish squire, Nell Bullen has enjoyed an idyllic upbringing, and despite confirmed rumors of plague, eagerly accompanies her father to London when he is inducted into the Royal Academy. Guided by the up-and-coming Samuel Pepys, Nell tours the city, avoiding the plague-ridden districts until by mischance she witnesses a horrifying mass burial. Sobered, she returns to Branford, not long before the local tailor takes ill. Viewed largely from the distant safety of the manor house, the townfolks’ principled decision to stay put rather than flee, and their subsequent suffering, will seem a remote catastrophe to readers, and Nell’s stilted narrative style (“Among our visitors from London was a singular young man whom I misjudged completely at the start,”) gives this the artificiality of a formula romance. Though the act from which this story springs merits commemoration, the inner and outer devastation wrought by disease is more vividly captured in Cynthia DeFelice’s Apprenticeship of Lucas Whittaker (1996) and Anna Myers’s Graveyard Girl (1995). (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8037-2393-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
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