Continuing the post–Civil War tale begun in Bigger (1994) and continued in Sooner (1998), Calvert takes young Tyler Bohannon, along with his ex-slave companion Isaac Peerce and dog Sooner, from Missouri to California. Already feeling wronged by his father, who had abandoned the family to fight in the war, and his mother, for remarrying, Tyler gets more bees in his bonnet when a keelboat captain treacherously trades him and Isaac to a group of Sioux. Then, adding insult to injury, Isaac gets far better treatment because his dark skin and woolly hair amaze their captors. Worst of all, when Tyler talks about escaping their enslavement, Isaac is reluctant to leave. Calvert hammers the irony of the role reversal into the ground, and fills Tyler so full of resentment that he comes across as little more than a walking sense of aggrievance. He’s also a bully; not only does he eventually browbeat Isaac into slipping away with him, but, deeply shocked by a white orphan’s disinterest in returning to white society, tries to drag her along too. In a quick, tidy resolution, the author brings Tyler and Isaac to Fort Benton, where they find the keelboat captain dying and Tyler’s stepfather waiting with fresh supplies, then sends the two travelers on to California in an afterword. This is billed as the final volume of a trilogy, but except for Tyler showing some signs of letting his resentment go, there’s little sense of closure. Weak. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-689-83472-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2002
From England’s Children’s Laureate, a searing WWI-era tale of a close extended family repeatedly struck by adversity and injustice. On vigil in the trenches, 17-year-old Thomas Peaceful looks back at a childhood marked by guilt over his father’s death, anger at the shabby treatment his strong-minded mother receives from the local squire and others—and deep devotion to her, to his brain-damaged brother Big Joe, and especially to his other older brother Charlie, whom he has followed into the army by lying about his age. Weaving telling incidents together, Morpurgo surrounds the Peacefuls with mean-spirited people at home, and devastating wartime experiences on the front, ultimately setting readers up for a final travesty following Charlie’s refusal of an order to abandon his badly wounded brother. Themes and small-town class issues here may find some resonance on this side of the pond, but the particular cultural and historical context will distance the story from American readers—particularly as the pace is deliberate, and the author’s hints about where it’s all heading are too rare and subtle to create much suspense. (Fiction. 11-13, adult)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-439-63648-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
In an intense, well-researched tale that will resonate particularly with readers in parts of the country where the West Nile virus and other insect-borne diseases are active, Anderson (Speak, 1999, etc.) takes a Philadelphia teenager through one of the most devastating outbreaks of yellow fever in our country’s history. It’s 1793, and though business has never been better at the coffeehouse run by Matilda’s widowed, strong-minded mother in what is then the national capital, vague rumors of disease come home to roost when the serving girl dies without warning one August night. Soon church bells are ringing ceaselessly for the dead as panicked residents, amid unrelenting heat and clouds of insects, huddle in their houses, stream out of town, or desperately submit to the conflicting dictates of doctors. Matilda and her mother both collapse, and in the ensuing confusion, they lose track of each other. Witnessing people behaving well and badly, Matilda first recovers slowly in a makeshift hospital, then joins the coffeehouse’s cook, Emma, a free African-American, in tending to the poor and nursing three small, stricken children. When at long last the October frosts signal the epidemic’s end, Emma and Matilda reopen the coffeehouse as partners, and Matilda’s mother turns up—alive, but a trembling shadow of her former self. Like Paul Fleischman’s Path of the Pale Horse (1983), which has the same setting, or Anna Myers’s Graveyard Girl (1995), about a similar epidemic nearly a century later, readers will find this a gripping picture of disease’s devastating effect on people, and on the social fabric itself. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-689-83858-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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