by Nancy Garden ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 25, 2002
Allie, almost 12, loves her life on Seal Head Island off the coast of Maine, but it promises to be a hard summer. Her lobsterman dad hurt his back, so the family sets up a pie shop, and sends Allie’s younger siblings to the mainland and Aunt Eulalie. Allie is used to summer people and their often fancy ways, but this year, there’s a new girl, Melanie, whose mother won’t let her have any dealings with the working-class “natives.” Melanie has spunk and fire and isn’t about to let her mother have complete control, so the girls begin a bumpy relationship. Melanie’s sister is pregnant, and their mother is trying to keep her hidden and away from the baby’s father—deemed socially unacceptable. Several colorful local characters—a regular summer person who is also a nurse, and a painter, a strange, none-too-clean fellow who can barely speak—play a key role in the action, which plays itself out in fairly predictable fashion. Most of the populace are drawn in simple strokes, but Allie and the island itself are fully realized, rich characters. Questions of out-of-wedlock pregnancy, class distinctions, wealth, and poverty are touched upon, if not wrestled with, and there’s just enough food for thought to keep things interesting. (Fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 25, 2002
ISBN: 0-374-34943-6
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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by Nancy Garden & illustrated by Sharon Wooding
by Christopher Paul Curtis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 1, 1995
Curtis debuts with a ten-year-old's lively account of his teenaged brother's ups and downs. Ken tries to make brother Byron out to be a real juvenile delinquent, but he comes across as more of a comic figure: getting stuck to the car when he kisses his image in a frozen side mirror, terrorized by his mother when she catches him playing with matches in the bathroom, earning a shaved head by coming home with a conk. In between, he defends Ken from a bully and buries a bird he kills by accident. Nonetheless, his parents decide that only a long stay with tough Grandma Sands will turn him around, so they all motor from Michigan to Alabama, arriving in time to witness the infamous September bombing of a Sunday school. Ken is funny and intelligent, but he gives readers a clearer sense of Byron's character than his own and seems strangely unaffected by his isolation and harassment (for his odd look—he has a lazy eye—and high reading level) at school. Curtis tries to shoehorn in more characters and subplots than the story will comfortably bear—as do many first novelists—but he creates a well-knit family and a narrator with a distinct, believable voice. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-385-32175-9
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1995
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by Jacqueline Woodson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998
Miah’s melodramatic death overshadows a tale as rich in social and personal insight as any of Woodson’s previous books.
In a meditative interracial love story with a wrenching climactic twist, Woodson (The House You Pass on the Way, 1997, etc.) offers an appealing pair of teenagers and plenty of intellectual grist, before ending her story with a senseless act of violence.
Jeremiah and Elisha bond from the moment they collide in the hall of their Manhattan prep school: He’s the only child of celebrity parents; she’s the youngest by ten years in a large family. Not only sharply sensitive to the reactions of those around them, Ellie and Miah also discover depths and complexities in their own intense feelings that connect clearly to their experiences, their social environment, and their own characters. In quiet conversations and encounters, Woodson perceptively explores varieties of love, trust, and friendship, as she develops well-articulated histories for both families. Suddenly Miah, forgetting his father’s warning never to be seen running in a white neighborhood, exuberantly dashes into a park and is shot down by police. The parting thought that, willy-nilly, time moves on will be a colder comfort for stunned readers than it evidently is for Ellie.
Miah’s melodramatic death overshadows a tale as rich in social and personal insight as any of Woodson’s previous books. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-23112-9
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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by Jacqueline Woodson ; illustrated by Rafael López
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