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THE SNOW GOOSE

Name: THE SNOW GOOSE
Author: Paul Gallico
ISBN: 978-0-375-84978-7

by Paul Gallico & illustrated by Angela Barrett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 11, 2007

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A tale of exquisite sentimentality and storytelling gains new appeal in Barrett’s magical hands. Gallico’s tale of the snow goose was first published in 1940, just after the Battle of Dunkirk, when thousands of British and French troops were rescued from the Germans by hundreds of small British boats. Philip Rhayader, a man crippled in body and spirit, lives alone in a lighthouse on the Essex coast, painting pictures and caring for the marsh birds. A wild young girl named Frith brings him an injured snow goose, somehow lost from Canada. He heals the goose, and the girl and bird return to him, warily but faithfully, season after season. Eventually Frith is grown, and feels stirrings of something else for the artist. Then it’s the spring of 1940, and Philip goes out across the water, the goose with him, to rescue those trapped soldiers on Dunkirk beach, seven at a time. Fritha knows he’s lost then and realizes what she has found, only to lose. Barrett approaches the story with a softness that matches the tone. The drawings are in graphite and pencil, with an occasional piece in color that lightens the mood. A lovely reworking for a whole new audience. (Historical fiction. 11-14)

Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2007

ISBN: 978-0-375-84978-7

Page Count: 48

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007

Categories:

CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION

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DUST OF EDEN

by Mariko Nagai ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2014

An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American...

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Crystal-clear prose poems paint a heart-rending picture of 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa’s journey from Seattle to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.

This vividly wrought story of displacement, told from Mina’s first-person perspective, begins as it did for so many Japanese-Americans: with the bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. The backlash of her Seattle community is instantaneous (“Jap, Jap, Jap, the word bounces / around the walls of the hall”), and Mina chronicles its effects on her family with a heavy heart. “I am an American, I scream / in my head, but my mouth is stuffed / with rocks; my body is a stone, like the statue / of a little Buddha Grandpa prays to.” When Roosevelt decrees that West Coast Japanese-Americans are to be imprisoned in inland camps, the Tagawas board up their house, leaving the cat, Grandpa’s roses and Mina’s best friend behind. Following the Tagawas from Washington’s Puyallup Assembly Center to Idaho’s Minidoka Relocation Center (near the titular town of Eden), the narrative continues in poems and letters. In them, injustices such as endless camp lines sit alongside even larger ones, such as the government’s asking interned young men, including Mina’s brother, to fight for America.

An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American internment. (historical note) (Verse/historical fiction. 11-14)

Pub Date: March 1, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-8075-1739-0

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Whitman

Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014

Categories:

CHILDREN'S FAMILY | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION

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PETEY

by Ben Mikaelsen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1998

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Born in 1920 with cerebral palsy and dismissed by ignorant doctors as feeble-minded, Petey Corbin spends all but the first two years of his long life institutionalized, his world barely larger than the walls of an asylum ward or, much later, nursing home. Within those walls, further imprisoned in an uncontrollable, atrophied body, he nonetheless experiences joy and love, sorrow, loss, and triumph as intensely as anyone on the outside. Able to communicate only with rudimentary sounds and facial expressions, he makes a series of friends through the years; as a very old man in a 1990s setting, he comes into contact with Trevor, a teenager who defends the old man against a trio of bullies, and remains a loyal companion through his final illness. This is actually two books in one, as with a midstream switch in point-of-view as the story becomes Trevor’s, focusing on his inner growth as he overcomes his initial disgust to become Petey’s friend. Mikaelsen portrays the places in which Petey is kept in (somewhat) less horrific terms than Kate Seago did in Matthew Unstrung (1998), and surrounds him with good-hearted people (even Petey’s parents are drawn sympathetically—they are plunged into poverty during his first two years by the bills his care entails). There are no accusations here, and despite some overly sentimentalized passages, the message comes through that every being deserves care, respect, and a chance to make a difference. (Fiction. 11-13)