A sword-swinging maiden encounters dangerous intrigue in newcomer Malone’s tepid historical adventure. Fifteen-year-old Ilena always felt like an outsider in the sixth-century north British village where she was raised. Although respectful of the villagers’ Druid faith, her family is Christian; and unlike the other girls, Ilena was raised to be a warrior, not a wife. After her parents’ deaths, she follows their hints about her heritage to the fortress of Dun Alyn. Her journey leads to battles with blue-painted barbarians and slave-hunting raiders, but also refuge, friendship, and a hint of romance. None of this can prepare her for the challenges she faces at Dun Alyn, where everything she once knew about herself proves false, and where her very life is endangered by a destiny she never imagined. This all should be exciting stuff, and the notion of presenting a strong heroine from a little-known historical period is a worthy one. Unfortunately, her stoic bravery constrains Ilena from showing any personality except by mooning after a handsome warrior; the remaining characters are little more than plot contrivances and generic villains. While a historical afterword broadly sketches the political background of the period, the narrative is riddled with errors of detail that undermine the already tenuous plausibility that Celtic Britain displayed a politically correct gender equality and tolerance for ethnic and religious differences unmatched by the present day. Still, Ilena’s story has moments of high drama and a few genuine surprises, which might appeal to fantasy and adventure fans. Mediocre, but harmless. (Fiction. 11-15)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-72915-4
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
Though it lacks references or suggestions for further reading, Arn's agonizing story is compelling enough that many readers...
A harrowing tale of survival in the Killing Fields.
The childhood of Arn Chorn-Pond has been captured for young readers before, in Michelle Lord and Shino Arihara's picture book, A Song for Cambodia (2008). McCormick, known for issue-oriented realism, offers a fictionalized retelling of Chorn-Pond's youth for older readers. McCormick's version begins when the Khmer Rouge marches into 11-year-old Arn's Cambodian neighborhood and forces everyone into the country. Arn doesn't understand what the Khmer Rouge stands for; he only knows that over the next several years he and the other children shrink away on a handful of rice a day, while the corpses of adults pile ever higher in the mango grove. Arn does what he must to survive—and, wherever possible, to protect a small pocket of children and adults around him. Arn's chilling history pulls no punches, trusting its readers to cope with the reality of children forced to participate in murder, torture, sexual exploitation and genocide. This gut-wrenching tale is marred only by the author's choice to use broken English for both dialogue and description. Chorn-Pond, in real life, has spoken eloquently (and fluently) on the influence he's gained by learning English; this prose diminishes both his struggle and his story.
Though it lacks references or suggestions for further reading, Arn's agonizing story is compelling enough that many readers will seek out the history themselves. (preface, author's note) (Historical fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-173093-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
PLB 0-679-99307-X This compelling tale of a passenger on the Underground Railroad is entirely populated with historical figures; not since Gary Paulsen’s Nightjohn (1993) has the physical and emotional impact of slavery been made so palpable. Child of a free father and a slave mother, Ann Maria Weems grows up in the warmth of a loving family that is suddenly torn apart when her brothers are sold South and money raised by abolitionists arrives, but only enough to purchase freedom for her mother and sister. Knowing that her harsh master will never willingly give her freedom, Ann Marie resolves to steal it when the opportunity—a staged kidnapping, at the hands of an abolitionist, Jacob Bigelow—arises. Only occasionally manipulating actual events, Carbone (Starting School With an Enemy, p. 809, etc.) sends Ann Marie from Maryland to Washington, where she hides for months in a garret, then on to relatives in Canada, where she drops permanently from sight. A richly detailed society emerges, in which the powerless hold their own through quick wit and strength of character, and the powerful, scarred by the fact of slavery, know little real peace. Varying in tone from devastating simplicity (“Master Charles loaded . . . the last of the chickens, five barrels of tobacco, two sacks of wheat, and his son, and took them all to Baltimore to be sold”) to subtle irony underlying scenes in which abolitionists gather to fuss over Ann Marie as if she were some rare animal, this story pays tribute to the power of the very idea of freedom. (Fiction. 11-15)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-89307-5
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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