An unflinching account of a rarely told side of the Holocaust.
When his parents are killed in the 1941 Nazi invasion of Poland, 13-year-old Piotr’s life takes an unimaginable turn.
As an ethnic German with Nordic features, he’s “racially valuable” to the Nazis, so he is sent by the Race and Settlement Office to Berlin to be raised by a German family. Piotr, renamed Peter, is adopted by a professor whose work with the Genealogical Office of the Reich determines the degree of racial purity of individuals. Peter is required to join the Hitler Youth, where he is as much an outsider as he was at school in Poland. He falls in love with Anna, eventually joining her progressive family’s efforts to deliver food to Berlin’s remaining Jews. Peter discovers disturbing truths about the Nazi’s treatment of children deemed “life unworthy of life” from his sister, just as the professor discovers that his adopted Aryan son had a Jewish grandmother. Fearing forced sterilization, Peter attempts a harrowing escape to Sweden with Anna and her mother. Dowswell’s skilled narrative weaves its way through flashbacks and several points of view, building in intensity as Peter grows from a child whose life as an “ausländer,” or foreigner, is dictated by chance and circumstance, to a young man whose growing awareness sparks his final, willful act.
An unflinching account of a rarely told side of the Holocaust. (resources, teacher’s guide) (Historical fiction. 10–14)Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59990-633-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
It’s 1968. The Vietnam War and Apollo 11 are in the background, and between a war in a distant land and a spacecraft heading to the moon, Doug Swieteck starts a new life in tiny Marysville, N.Y. He hates “stupid Marysville,” so far from home and his beloved Yankee Stadium, and he may have moved away, but his cruel father and abusive brothers are still with him. Readers of the Newbery Honor–winning The Wednesday Wars (2007) will remember Doug, now less edgy and gradually more open to the possibilities of life in a small town. Each chapter opens with a print of a John James Audubon painting, and Mr. Powell, the town librarian, teaches Doug to paint and see the world as an artist. He meets pretty Lillian Spicer, just the feisty friend Doug needs, and a whole cast of small-town characters opens Doug to what he might be in the world. This is Schmidt’s best novel yet—darker than The Wednesday Wars and written with more restraint, but with the same expert attention to voice, character and big ideas. By the end of this tale, replete with allusions to Our Town, Doug realizes he’s pretty happy in Marysville, where holding hands with the green-eyed girl—and a first kiss—rival whatever might be happening on the moon. (Historical fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-547-15260-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Clarion Books
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2011
Readers who hungry purely for lots of effective detail of an ancient culture, time and place may find this a...
Having made her way through the European princesses of note (Duchessina, 2007, etc.), Meyer dishes up historical-fiction-lite in this imagined account of Cleopatra’s coming of age.
Readers follow the mildly compelling first-person account in sections, from the 10-year-old touring the Nile with her father, through the teenage power struggles with her maniacal sisters, to the securing of her throne, which she pointedly ensures at the cost of her virginity: “As the night goes on, the magnetism between us grows as strong as the pull of the moon on the tides. By the next morning I am Caesar’s mistress. I am not Caesar's conquest. He is mine.” The occasionally vivid voice of an intelligent young woman lapses into uncharacteristic moments of denseness (as she fails to heed advice she’s just given herself) or starchy historical or cultural explanations for the readers’ benefit, often inserted into conversation (“But you are right—[Caesar] has a wife in Rome. Her name is Calpurnia. His first wife, Cornelia, bore him his only child, Julia, and both are dead. He divorced his second wife, Pompeia…”). For such an exciting history, the narrative arc lags under the inconsistent voice.
Readers who hungry purely for lots of effective detail of an ancient culture, time and place may find this a digestible-enough vehicle for it, with oodles of backmatter for support. (Historical fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: June 7, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4169-8727-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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