As timely as historical fiction can be
Rosetta’s life changes when a 16-year-old refugee from the Nazis comes to live with her.
A grade six girl in 1942 Montreal, narrator Rosetta has two sisters, but she hadn’t expected to gain an older brother. Isaac fled Hitler’s Germany on the Kindertransport but was later interned by the British government. Now freed, he’s alone in a foreign country. Isaac’s entry into Rosetta’s family isn’t frictionless: Rosetta squabbles with her sisters, she’s jealous of Isaac’s relationship with her father, and she snoops in his few possessions. But she and Isaac grow close, and what she learns about his past is worrying. Rosetta is from a family of light-skinned observant Jews and is ignorant of religious segregation or persecution. Isaac, with one Jewish parent and one Christian, saw his own mother—a tall, blonde, blue-eyed “Aryan goddess” who works for the Nazis—repudiate him. Even in theoretically liberal-minded Montreal, Isaac’s not free of persecution. Jewish quotas will likely keep him from attending medical school at McGill. Moreover, Rosetta’s best friend’s brother, a handsome blond non-Jew, says vile anti-Semitic things to Isaac. Italicized, phonetically rendered accents (“So, one afternoon, I vent der”) keep Isaac at arm’s length even as Rosetta grows closer to him, and there’s more than one “remarkable coincidence” holding the whole together, but readers will respond to how flawed, likable Rosetta learns how to welcome refugees wholeheartedly.
As timely as historical fiction can be . (Historical fiction. 8-11)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5415-4043-9
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Kar-Ben
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Suggesting that some things haven’t changed since the Stone Age, Briggs (A Bit More Bert, p. 1300, etc.) introduces a moon-faced lad who infuriates his clueless parents by insistently questioning things-as-they-are. To the despair and fury of his dad, Dug, and mom, Dugs, Ug is forever complaining about his stone trousers, wanting something nicer for breakfast than “cold bits of dead animal,” wondering whether the stream couldn’t be “bent” a bit closer to the family cave. He’s not all talk, either, though most of his bright ideas come to naught; his stone boat sinks, his wheel rolls down the hill but has no other apparent use, and though his father indulgently cuts trousers for him from animal hide, they aren’t wearable, as sewing hasn’t been invented. Briggs tells the tale in cartoon panels with dialogue balloons, footnoting his own anachronisms: “No one living in the Stone Age would know he was living in the Stone Age. He would believe he was living in the modern age. Today we believe we are living in the modern age. Time will tell.” Ultimately, Ug fulfills his mother’s dark prediction that he would end up painting on walls, and is last seen beneath his art, still pining for something better. Beneath the satiric barbs there’s a touch of poignancy to this tale of a da Vinci just a few dozen millennia ahead of his time. (Picture book. 8-11)
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-91611-3
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
IN THE NEWS
“By March 5, 1770, it was dangerous to be a soldier in Boston.” In a few lines of terse prose illustrated with densely hatched black-and-white pictures, Decker lays out the causes of the tension between Bostonians and British troops, and then delivers a blow-by-blow account of events on that March night and the ensuing trials. Along with casting a grim tone over all, his dark, crowded illustrations capture the incident’s confusion and also add details to the narrative. Despite some questionable choices—he names most of the soldiers but none of the casualties, and except for a row of coffins in one picture, never mentions how many actually died—the author leaves readers with a general understanding of what happened, and with a final scene of John Adams (who defended the soldiers in court) pondering the necessity of protecting true Liberty from the “lawless mob,” some food for thought as well. (Informational picture book. 9-10)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59078-608-6
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Calkins Creek/Boyds Mills
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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