The death of a brother transforms a preteen’s discontent into guilt in this weakly constructed drama, set on the Nebraska prairie in the 1850s, just before the Homestead Act. A year and a half after moving from Missouri, Abbie and her family live in a one-room sod house, while her father works and stays in town, 15 miles away, trying to raise money so they can buy the land they’ve claimed. After a rare, leisurely visit to town, Abbie arrives home to find both of her brothers stricken with cholera; she also comes down with the disease, and her recovery is slowed by the twin convictions that she’s responsible for the baby brother’s death, and that her parents hate her. Hermes (When Snow Lay Soft on the Mountain, 1996, etc.) expresses decidedly antique attitudes toward native people, described as “Indians” who are wild and mischievous; one of them, in response to Abbie’s father’s “How, do,” actually says “How.” She also lets most of the air out of her story by building toward a climax, involving both an impending auction and a public recitation, then leaving the actual scene out. Next to Jennifer Armstrong’s Black-Eyed Susan (1995) or Pam Conrad’s wrenching Prairie Song (1987), the characters and setting here are only dimly realized, and readers will be let down by the anticlimactic ending. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-380-97451-7
Page Count: 140
Publisher: Avon/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
This weave of perceptive, well-told tales wears its agenda with unusual grace.
Two young people of different generations get profound lessons in the tragic, enduring legacy of war.
Raised on the thrilling yarns of his great-grandpa Jacob and obsessed with both World War II and first-person–shooter video games, Trevor is eager to join the 93-year-old vet when he is invited to revisit the French town his unit had helped to liberate. In alternating chapters, the overseas trip retraces the parallel journeys of two young people—Trevor, 12, and Jacob, in 1944, just five years older—with similarly idealized visions of what war is like as they travel both then and now from Fort Benning to Omaha Beach and then through Normandy. Jacob’s wartime experiences are an absorbing whirl of hard fighting, sudden death, and courageous acts spurred by necessity…but the modern trip turns suspenseful too, as mysterious stalkers leave unsettling tokens and a series of hostile online posts that hint that Jacob doesn’t have just German blood on his hands. Korman acknowledges the widely held view of World War II as a just war but makes his own sympathies plain by repeatedly pointing to the unavoidable price of conflict: “Wars may have winning sides, but everybody loses.” Readers anticipating a heavy-handed moral will appreciate that Trevor arrives at a refreshingly realistic appreciation of video games’ pleasures and limitations. As his dad puts it: “War makes a better video game….But if you’re looking for a way to live, I’ll take peace every time.”
This weave of perceptive, well-told tales wears its agenda with unusual grace. (Fiction/historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-29020-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
Taking a page from Avi’s The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle (1990), Kehret (I’m Not Who You Think I Am, p. 223, etc.) pens a similar story of a girl who goes to sea. Determined not to be separated from her seriously ill mother, Emma, 12, embarks on a plan that results in the adventure of a lifetime. Sent to live with Aunt Martha and her arrogant son, Odolf, Emma carefully plots her escape. Disguising herself in her cousin’s used clothes, she sneaks out while the household slumbers and stows away on what she believes to be a ship carrying her parents from England to the warmer climate of France. Instead, the ship is the evil, ill-fated Black Lightning, under the command of the notorious Captain Beacon. Emma finds herself sharing quarters with a crew of filthy, surly, dangerous men. When a fierce storm swamps the ship, Emma desperately seizes her chance to escape, drifting for several days and nights aboard a hatch cover and finally carried to land somewhere on the coast of Africa. Hungry, thirsty, and alone, Emma faces the daunting prospect of slow starvation, but survives due to a relationship she builds with a band of chimpanzees. This page-turning adventure story shows evidence of solid research and experienced plotting—the pacing is breathless. Kehret paints a starkly realistic portrait, complete with sounds and smells of the difficult and unpleasant life aboard ship. (Fiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-671-03416-2
Page Count: 138
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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