Harmony McClean’s life is like the Tennessee mountain cabin she lives in: “never entirely finished and always in the process of becoming something else.” She can lie down in her backyard and touch Tennessee, North Carolina, and Virginia all at the same time, but readers soon realize her reach extends even further. She has powers that connect her to the trees, the stars, and the universe. Harmony, in fact, arrived in the Hamlin Mountains when a falling star landed in Felix McGuillicuddy’s wife’s chicken coop. Felix found Harmony, “naked and crowing louder than a rooster,” next to the star. Now 14, Harmony realizes her powers. She can make things happen just by thinking about them: set the table or start a fire in the fireplace. She sets off smoke detectors, blows up microwaves, and short-circuits vacuum cleaners just by walking by. But how should she handle such powers—hide them and fit into her community or embrace them and risk being different? Murphy (Black Angels, 2001, etc.) has created a magical story written with a light, lyrical touch, always rooted in the particulars of the mountain setting. Readers will accept the premise and care about Harmony because she seems real, as real and mysterious as the stars. By the end, she finds harmony and accepts herself and her gifts, using them to help a dying woman, protect her forest from a lumber company, and release a coyote from a steel trap. Harmony has come to realize the importance of having the courage “to live the life you were born to live.” (Fiction. 11+)
Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2002
ISBN: 0-385-72938-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2002
Drawing on her experience with a relief organization on the Thai border, Ho tells the story of a Cambodian family, fleeing the rival factions of the 80's while hoping to gather resources to return to farming in their homeland. Narrator Dara, 12, and the remnants of her family have arrived at a refugee camp soon after her father's summary execution. At first, the camp is a haven: food is plentiful, seed rice is available, and they form a bond with another family- -brother Sarun falls in love with Nea, and Dara makes friends with Nea's cousin, Jantu, who contrives marvelous toys from mud and bits of scrap; made wise by adversity, Jantu understands that the process of creation outweighs the value of things, and that dead loved ones may live on in memory. The respite is brief: Vietnamese bombing disrupts the camp, and the family is temporarily but terrifyingly separated. Later, Jantu is wounded by friendly fire and doesn't survive; but her tragic death empowers Dara to confront Sarun, who's caught up in mindless militarism instigated by a charismatic leader, and persuade him to travel home with the others—to plant rice and build a family instead of waging war. Again, Ho (Rice Without Rain, 1990) skillfully shapes her story to dramatize political and humanitarian issues. The easily swayed Sarun lacks dimension, but the girls are more subtly drawn—Dara's growing courage and assertiveness are especially convincing and admirable. Touching, authentic, carefully wrought- -and with an unusually appealing jacket. (Fiction. 11-15)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-374-31340-7
Page Count: 163
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
After witnessing the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, Daniel is suddenly transported, at age 14, from his comfortable life in Frankfurt to a Polish ghetto, then to Auschwitz and Buchenwald—losing most of his family along the way, seeing Nazi brutality of both the casual and the calculated kind, and recording atrocities with a smuggled camera (``What has happened to me?...Who am I? Where am I going?''). Matas, explicating an exhibit of photos and other materials at the new United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, creates a convincing composite youth and experience—fictional but carefully based on survivors' accounts. It's a savage story with no attempt to soften the culpability of the German people; Daniel's profound anger is easier to understand than is his father's compassion or his sister's plea to ``chose love. Always choose love.'' Daniel survives to be reunited, after the war, with his wife-to-be, but his dying friend's last word echoes beyond the happy ending: ``Remember...'' An unusual undertaking, effectively carried out. Chronology; glossary. (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-590-46920-7
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1993
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