by Michaela MacColl ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 4, 2016
Misses the cultural mark.
In 1877 the 4th U.S. Cavalry was ordered to annihilate the Indian problem in Texas.
As Ndé/Lipan Apache protagonist Casita and her mother discuss her Changing Woman ceremony, the cavalry attacks her village, massacring most, including Casita’s mother. Taken with her younger brother and other survivors to Fort Clark, Casita hides how she has learned English while traveling with her father until a white Quaker nurse, Mollie Smith, earns her trust. Considered prisoners of war by the Army, the children live with the nurse and her lieutenant husband as servants. Jack is delighted to train the soldiers’ horses and pleased to be called their “mascot.” After three years at the fort, the children are all transferred to the Carlisle Indian School. While there, Jack excels and later is adopted by one of the white teachers, but Casita remains and, with her Apache girlfriends, defiantly re-enacts the Ndé Changing Woman ceremony to honor lost traditions. Though evidently approved by two Native elders—a relative of the real-life Casita supplies an afterword—much of MacColl’s book is problematic for today’s readers. Jack’s pleasure at being named mascot feels very out of touch with current campaigns to eliminate Indian mascots, and calling the Changing Woman deity a “goddess” forces Ndé cosmology into Western structures. Furthermore, perhaps out of an overabundance of sensitivity to middle-grade readers, MacColl downplays the Carlisle School experience, a well-documented historic trauma.
Misses the cultural mark. (author’s note, photos, bibliography) (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62979-742-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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by Skila Brown ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 25, 2014
A promising debut.
The horrors of the Guatemalan civil war are filtered through the eyes of a boy coming of age.
Set in Chopán in 1981, this verse novel follows the life of Carlos, old enough to feed the chickens but not old enough to wring their necks as the story opens. Carlos’ family and other villagers are introduced in early poems, including Santiago Luc who remembers “a time when there were no soldiers / driving up in jeeps, holding / meetings, making / laws, scattering / bullets into the trees, / hunting guerillas.” On an errand for his mother when soldiers attack, Carlos makes a series of decisions that ultimately save his life but leave him doubting his manliness and bravery. An epilogue of sorts helps tie the main narrative to the present, and the book ends on a hopeful note. In her debut, Brown has chosen an excellent form for exploring the violence and loss of war, but at times, stylistic decisions (most notably attempts at concrete poetry) appear to trump content. While some of the individual poems may be difficult for readers to follow and the frequent references to traditional masculinity may strike some as patriarchal, the use of Spanish is thoughtful, as are references to local flora and fauna. The overall effect is a moving introduction to a subject seldom covered in fiction for youth.
A promising debut. (glossary, author Q&A) (Verse/historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-7636-6516-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 23, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
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by Skila Brown ; illustrated by Jamey Christoph
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by Skila Brown ; illustrated by Bob Kolar
by Mariko Nagai ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2014
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American...
Crystal-clear prose poems paint a heart-rending picture of 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa’s journey from Seattle to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.
This vividly wrought story of displacement, told from Mina’s first-person perspective, begins as it did for so many Japanese-Americans: with the bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. The backlash of her Seattle community is instantaneous (“Jap, Jap, Jap, the word bounces / around the walls of the hall”), and Mina chronicles its effects on her family with a heavy heart. “I am an American, I scream / in my head, but my mouth is stuffed / with rocks; my body is a stone, like the statue / of a little Buddha Grandpa prays to.” When Roosevelt decrees that West Coast Japanese-Americans are to be imprisoned in inland camps, the Tagawas board up their house, leaving the cat, Grandpa’s roses and Mina’s best friend behind. Following the Tagawas from Washington’s Puyallup Assembly Center to Idaho’s Minidoka Relocation Center (near the titular town of Eden), the narrative continues in poems and letters. In them, injustices such as endless camp lines sit alongside even larger ones, such as the government’s asking interned young men, including Mina’s brother, to fight for America.
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American internment. (historical note) (Verse/historical fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8075-1739-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
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