Patient readers will nevertheless enjoy this combination spy novel/coming-of-age story.
In the sequel to The Romeo and Juliet Code (2011), 12-year-old Flissy’s World War II adventures continue.
Flissy is living with her grandmother, aunt and father, Gideon, as her mother and stepfather (who is—complicatedly—also her father’s brother) have disappeared while spying in Europe. In a voice that is somehow both charmingly lyrical and also notably authentic, Flissy relates the events on the homefront, as foster cousin Derek, just a year older and—she believes—the love of her life, attempts to track down his father. Unfortunately, a man claiming to be him shows up, but it’s perfectly clear to Flissy, who’s sworn to secrecy, that the man is a fraud. Finally, in despair over the wreckage of her family, Flissy runs screaming into the nighttime sea, only to be saved from certain death by Gideon—an epiphanic moment. Even after the fraudulent-father plotline is resolved in a suspenseful climax that comes only midway through, the tale goes on. When her mother finally returns after being rescued by Gideon, who’s then lost in the fog of war, Flissy has much to work out with the woman who has become a stranger to her. In an attractively depicted Maine coastal setting, her relationship with Derek evolves, she mends fences with her mother, and she waits for a resolution of her father’s and stepfather’s situations. While realistic and employing lovely language, the slow, deliberate pacing sometimes diminishes the overall effect.
Patient readers will nevertheless enjoy this combination spy novel/coming-of-age story. (Historical fiction. 11-16)Pub Date: June 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-44360-9
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Levine/Scholastic
Review Posted Online: April 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American...
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
BOOK REVIEW
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