A charming, emotional story about family, fishing, and self-discovery.
A teenage girl in 1967 explores her father’s veiled past in this debut historical novel.
Fifteen-year-old Ida Petrovich worships her dad, a gregarious fisherman who makes a daring crossing every year from their town of Annisport, Washington, to Ketchikan, Alaska. But this year, his boat never returns home; the Coast Guard inform Ida and her mother that he’s “presumed drowned,” and they struggle with accepting that “someone’s dead when there’s no evidence.” Ida overhears a cryptic conversation between her mother and grandmother about her father, in which her mom says “I can’t have a funeral when I’m not even sure he’s dead.” So Ida decides to uncover the truth for herself. After contacting a woman whom his father knew in Ketchikan, she decides to run away from home and work at a cannery there for the summer, in the hopes of finding out more about her dad. Gutting fish for hours on end proves “tiring and monotonous,” but over time, Ida becomes friends with a spirited Tlingit girl named Jody and grows close to Sam Taposok, a Filipino-American boy from her high school who faces daily discrimination. Through it all, Ida grapples with her father’s identity: his affinity for the “scoundrel” raven of Alaskan myth; his personal charisma, which allowed him to create communities beyond his family; and his love for home, coupled with his desire to leave it. McGaffin deftly maps how Ida’s view of her father changes from an idol to a flawed human, as well as the way that grief encroaches on every element of one’s life. Overall, though, her novel is more heartwarming than bleak as it chronicles how the Petrovich women haltingly find ways to survive and plan for an unforeseen future. The relationship between Ida and her mother provides the main dramatic tension; the father’s absence exposes how they used him as an emotional buffer and forces them to communicate their fears. These heart-to-hearts become slightly less believable as the tale winds to a close, and McGaffin ties everything up a bit too neatly. Nevertheless, the story maintains a certain rawness that sustains its impact.
A charming, emotional story about family, fishing, and self-discovery.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-943006-81-6
Page Count: 343
Publisher: SparkPress
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
