Honest and gripping; a new take on a familiar historical event.
A family’s history intertwines with the aftermath of the sinking of the Titanic.
Nineteen-year-old Colette is tired of staying home while her mother, brother Antoine, and sister Genevieve go to work in 1929 New York City. Her mother says she doesn’t want Colette to get sick, which happened often when she was young, but Colette has been healthy for years. She wonders if Papa would have let her work if he were around. But she has no memory of the father who died when she was a toddler—only curiosity about his identity. During one of her few permitted outings, Colette secretly gets a job with Walter, the grocery store owner, to lower her family’s unpaid debt. There, Colette spends time with her crush, Claude, who also has a mother from France, and learns about Walter’s experiences on the Titanic. In fascinating journal-style entries, Walter describes the tragedy and its aftermath. Smith intertwines elements of the social and economic landscape: Colette’s learning about racism, the stock market crash that affects her family’s factory jobs, and the vivid Greenwich Village social scene. Readers will identify with Colette’s journey as she questions her origins and negotiates her place in the world.
Honest and gripping; a new take on a familiar historical event. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: April 21, 2026
ISBN: 9781546165088
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2026
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
Nineteenth-century tomboy Louisa Cosgrove wants to study medicine, but after her indulgent father's death, that dream seems impossibly distant. Her mother dispatches her to family friends, but Louisa never arrives. Instead, she is taken to Wildthorn Hall, an insane asylum. The staff insist her name is Lucy Childs, and her treatment ranges from the relatively benign (tranquilizers) to the horrific (sensory deprivation). The mystery of Louisa's incarceration is revealed through alternating chapters of her present and childhood: Like many of her fellow "patients," Louisa's been committed for being a troublesome woman. Luckily, her family doesn't know of those tendencies that would make her utterly irredeemable—her overly fond feelings for her beautiful cousin Grace. Unlike many of the other inmates, who seem to develop mental illness from the cruelty of their surroundings, Louisa is determined to escape, perhaps with the help of a lovely asylum employee, Eliza. Despite a too-pat ending, Louisa and Eliza provide a window into a shameful history of mental health care and women's incarceration that only ended in living memory. (Historical fiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-547-37017-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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