One of history’s most dramatic heroines is restrained by a low-key presentation. Fifteen-year-old Æthelflæd, eldest child of Alfred the Great, spends her days learning her letters and wandering with her beloved brother. But Flæd loses these simple freedoms once her father betroths her to the ruler of Mercia, to cement an alliance against the marauding Danes. Flæd is appalled; not only is she to leave her home to marry a much older stranger, but she is also saddled with a warder who shadows her every movement. Nonetheless, Flæd and her guard slowly build a tentative friendship; he teaches her weapons and tactics, and she shares her tricks of horsemanship and woodcraft. But enemies are secretly watching, waiting for their moment to strike; and Flæd’s future will depend on how much she has learned. Tingle briefly notes the sources for the real Æthelflæd, and her first novel painstakingly recreates Anglo-Saxon life with numerous telling details, from tidbits of gnomic poetry to the construction of shoes. Yet the central characters remain maddeningly elusive; all the time spent inside Flæd’s viewpoint gives little feeling for her personality. The slow-paced plot is equally uninvolving; only in the final chapters—when Flæd has to draw from all her lessons in history, poetry, politics, and war, in order to lead her rebellious retainers safely through the bandits’ murderous assaults—do all these carefully laid nuggets of information come together in an exciting, and moving, climax. Unfortunately, by then too many readers may have given up. (Fiction. 11-16)
Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-399-23580-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
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
Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch.
A Jewish girl joins up with Polish resistance groups to fight for her people against the evils of the Holocaust.
Chaya Lindner is forcibly separated from her family when they are consigned to the Jewish ghetto in Krakow. The 16-year-old is taken in by the leaders of Akiva, a fledgling Jewish resistance group that offers her the opportunity to become a courier, using her fair coloring to pass for Polish and sneak into ghettos to smuggle in supplies and information. Chaya’s missions quickly become more dangerous, taking her on a perilous journey from a disastrous mission in Krakow to the ghastly ghetto of Lodz and eventually to Warsaw to aid the Jews there in their gathering uprising inside the walls of the ghetto. Through it all, she is partnered with a secretive young girl whom she is reluctant to trust. The trajectory of the narrative skews toward the sensational, highlighting moments of resistance via cinematic action sequences but not pausing to linger on the emotional toll of the Holocaust’s atrocities. Younger readers without sufficient historical knowledge may not appreciate the gravity of the events depicted. The principal characters lack depth, and their actions and the situations they find themselves in often require too much suspension of disbelief to pass for realism.
Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch. (afterword) (Historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-338-14847-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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