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BORDERLANDS

Vivid and original, Carter's hefty tale insistently upends the myths of a young country without diluting its epochal images...

The author of Bury the Dead (1987) crafts an authentic tale of a feisty young survivor in the Old West.

Ben and his older brother Bo Curtis are both in their teens when their Ma turns ""sikly"" and dies on their tiny scrub-land ranch in Texas. An old debt forces the boys off the land and onto the trail, driving a thousand steers to Abilene, Kansas, where Bo is shot in a gambling feud. Ben yearns for revenge, but he's handier at storekeeping than at tracking killers. He starts to accrue a fortune; then his investments—stocks, land-holdings—turn to dust. By the end, he has learned to skin buffalo, faced his brother's killer, and discovered that his hardened beliefs regarding Indians and blacks have no meaning in the teeming, cruel new land. Ben's glib narration (in dialect) follows his odyssey through never-romanticized landscapes of the Great Plains.

Vivid and original, Carter's hefty tale insistently upends the myths of a young country without diluting its epochal images of the not-so-distant past.

Pub Date: July 31, 1990

ISBN: 0-374-30895-0

Page Count: 426

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000

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TIES THAT BIND, TIES THAT BREAK

Namioka (Den of the White Fox, 1997, etc.) offers readers a glimpse of the ritual of foot-binding, and a surprising heroine whose life is determined by her rejection of that ritual. Ailin is spirited—her family thinks uncontrollable—even at age five, in her family’s compound in China in 1911, she doesn’t want to have her feet bound, especially after Second Sister shows Ailin her own bound feet and tells her how much it hurts. Ailin can see already how bound feet will restrict her movements, and prevent her from running and playing. Her father takes the revolutionary step of permitting her to leave her feet alone, even though the family of Ailin’s betrothed then breaks off the engagement. Ailin goes to the missionary school and learns English; when her father dies and her uncle cuts off funds for tuition, she leaves her family to become a nanny for an American missionary couple’s children. She learns all the daily household chores that were done by servants in her own home, and finds herself, painfully, cut off from her own culture and separate from the Americans. At 16, she decides to go with the missionaries when they return to San Francisco, where she meets and marries another Chinese immigrant who starts his own restaurant. The metaphor of things bound and unbound is a ribbon winding through this vivid narrative; the story moves swiftly, while Ailin is a brave and engaging heroine whose difficult choices reflect her time and her gender. (Fiction. 9-14)

Pub Date: May 1, 1999

ISBN: 0-385-32666-1

Page Count: 154

Publisher: Delacorte

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999

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GOING SOLO

A delightfully captivating swatch of autobiography from the author of Kiss. Kiss, Switch Bitch and many others. Schoolboy Dahl wanted adventure. Classes bored him, there was work to be had in Africa, and war clouds loomed on the world's horizons. He finds himself with a trainee's job with Shell Oil of East Africa and winds up in what is now Tanzania. Then war comes in 1939 and Dahl's adventures truly begin. At the war's outbreak, Dahl volunteers for the RAF, signing on to be a fighter pilot. Wounded in the Libyan desert, he spends six months recuperating in a military hospital, then rejoins his unit in Greece, only to be driven back by the advancing Germans. On April 20, 1941, he goes head on against the Luftwaffe in the Battle of Athens. On-target bio installment with, one hopes, lots more of this engrossing life to come.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1986

ISBN: 0142413836

Page Count: 209

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1986

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