Song of the Trees, which won a Council on Interracial Books award, is based on one of the true stories the author's father used to tell about growing up black in Depression-era Mississippi. Here, when Papa is way down in Louisiana laying railroad tracks "so his children can eat," white lumbermen move in and, offering Grandma $65 for all they care to take, begin cutting down trees on the family's land. Cassie's older brother Stacey goes off to fetch Papa, who arrives a few days later (just in time to save Cassie and her younger brothers from a belt-thrashing by Mr. Anderson, the crew leader whose efforts they've been obstructing), prepared, as the intruders come to realize, to blow up the forest if the white men don't clear off at once. In the beginning Cassie, who often listens to the trees singing though her brother says it's only the wind, wakes up to a gray morning—except for the trees of the forest, which "stood dark, almost black, still holding the night." Later she plays under her "wintry-smelling hiding tree" and. then, just before the lumbermen come, she's disturbed by the trees' "eerie silence." This is enough to make us feel their specialness, as elsewhere the prose is plain and direct, the story allowed to tell itself.
Pub Date: April 1, 1975
ISBN: 0142500755
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1975
Categories: CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Poignant, respectful, and historically accurate while pulsating with emotional turmoil, adventure, and suspense.
13
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In the midst of political turmoil, how do you escape the only country that you’ve ever known and navigate a new life? Parallel stories of three different middle school–aged refugees—Josef from Nazi Germany in 1938, Isabel from 1994 Cuba, and Mahmoud from 2015 Aleppo—eventually intertwine for maximum impact.
Three countries, three time periods, three brave protagonists. Yet these three refugee odysseys have so much in common. Each traverses a landscape ruled by a dictator and must balance freedom, family, and responsibility. Each initially leaves by boat, struggles between visibility and invisibility, copes with repeated obstacles and heart-wrenching loss, and gains resilience in the process. Each third-person narrative offers an accessible look at migration under duress, in which the behavior of familiar adults changes unpredictably, strangers exploit the vulnerabilities of transients, and circumstances seem driven by random luck. Mahmoud eventually concludes that visibility is best: “See us….Hear us. Help us.” With this book, Gratz accomplishes a feat that is nothing short of brilliant, offering a skillfully wrought narrative laced with global and intergenerational reverberations that signal hope for the future. Excellent for older middle grade and above in classrooms, book groups, and/or communities looking to increase empathy for new and existing arrivals from afar.
Poignant, respectful, and historically accurate while pulsating with emotional turmoil, adventure, and suspense. (maps, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: July 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-545-88083-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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PROFILES
The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction (Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction—a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.
Five years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her; the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter; later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here; like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events—but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 1, 1989
ISBN: 0547577095
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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