Irreverent and sassy, Tara-My-Stara (as her hip mom calls her) is determined to be a “regular Canadian,” not a hyphenated one. Gilmore (Mina’s Spring of Colors, not reviewed, etc.) has lived in India, England, and Canada, just like Rohini, Tara’s mom, and she writes realistically about this family from India who don’t emphasize their cultural background to any great degree. Tara’s Social Studies teacher and some of the kids in her class want to define her as different (in positive and negative ways), but she resists this notion, knowing that she has lived in Ottawa all her life. Her 15-year-old typical teenager’s life is upset by two other events. She meets Jeff, a young man who has just moved to town, and her paternal grandmother, a staunch Indian Nationalist, comes to visit for the first time. Naniji seems most critical of her son’s wife, Rohini, her Western ways, and her lack of traditional respect, but she is probably saddened by the fact that her son chose to live in Canada with his bride. Tara takes her mother’s side and refuses to warm up to her grandmother until a school assignment encourages Tara to interview her. When she learns more about her family’s role in Gandhi’s “Quit India” campaign in 1942, she begins to realize that her grandmother is more than just a stern old woman who can’t adjust to new ways. Tara’s first-person narrative flippantly relates the ups and downs of contemporary family life and the on-again, off-again relationships with Jeff and Erin, her longtime best friend, but her teenage voice tends to veer toward an overuse of words like “crappy.” This independent heroine wrestles with the themes of cultural identity and personal individuality, adolescent issues in Canada and the US. Development of some minor characters is weak (Raj, the father, never comes to life), but Tara, Rohini, and Naniji are strong women who fight back against the tone of didacticism that sometimes floats to the surface. (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: July 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8050-6475-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Explanatory note; reading list.
Yep illuminates the Chinese immigrant experience here and abroad in a follow-up to The Serpent's Children (1984) and Mountain Light (1985).
After accidentally killing one of the hated Manchu soldiers, Otter (14) flees Kwangtung for the "Golden Mountain"; he finds his adoptive father Squeaky and Uncle Foxfire in the Sierra Nevada, where thousands of "Guests" are laboriously carving a path for the railroad. Brutal cold, dangerous work, and a harsh overseer take their toll as Squeaky is blinded in a tunnel accident, Foxfire is lost in a storm, and other workers are frozen or half-starved. By the end, toughened in body and spirit, Otter resolves never to forget them or their sacrifices. Foxfire and Otter consider themselves only temporary residents here, preparing for the more important work of modernizing their own country while ridding it of Manchu, Europeans, and, especially, the scourge of opium. America is a dreamlike place; English dialogue is printed in italics as a tongue foreign to most of the characters; and though Otter befriends the overseer's troubled son, such social contact is discouraged on both sides. In a story enlivened with humor and heroism, Yep pays tribute to the immigrants who played such a vital role in our country's history.
Explanatory note; reading list. (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1993
ISBN: 0-06-022971-3
Page Count: 276
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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