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BRO

Name: BRO
Author: Robert Newton Peck
ISBN: 0-06-052974-1

by Robert Newton Peck ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2004

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Nine-year-old Tugwell Dockery doesn’t speak. People think it’s because of the horrible train crash that killed his parents, but no, something he witnessed years ago made him mute. His older brother, Broda Joe Dockery, knows Tug is smart and knows he’ll talk again someday, but Bro is in prison for another year, though plotting an escape. Told from several rapidly shifting, third-person points of view, the story races along. A corrupt prison warden, a prison break, a swamp full of deadly gators and snakes, and mysterious terrors in Tug’s memory give the story a larger-than-life feel. The opening chapter is a model of sharp descriptive writing, and a later birthing scene is reminiscent of a famous episode in A Day No Pigs Would Die. Allusions to prison violence and a graphic scene out of Tug’s memory make this a work for an older audience. (Fiction. 12+)

Pub Date: June 1, 2004

ISBN: 0-06-052974-1

Page Count: 160

Publisher: HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004

Categories:

CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
WEEDS IN BLOOM
by Robert Newton Peck

- BOOK REVIEW
HORSE THIEF
by Robert Newton Peck

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EXTRA INNINGS
by Robert Newton Peck

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PRISONER B-3087

by Alan Gratz ; Ruth Gruener ; Jack Gruener ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2013

A bone-chilling tale not to be ignored by the universe.

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If Anne Frank had been a boy, this is the story her male counterpart might have told. At least, the very beginning of this historical novel reads as such.

It is 1939, and Yanek Gruener is a 10-year old Jew in Kraków when the Nazis invade Poland. His family is forced to live with multiple other families in a tiny apartment as his beloved neighborhood of Podgórze changes from haven to ghetto in a matter of weeks. Readers will be quickly drawn into this first-person account of dwindling freedoms, daily humiliations and heart-wrenching separations from loved ones. Yet as the story darkens, it begs the age-old question of when and how to introduce children to the extremes of human brutality. Based on the true story of the life of Jack Gruener, who remarkably survived not just one, but 10 different concentration camps, this is an extraordinary, memorable and hopeful saga told in unflinching prose. While Gratz’s words and early images are geared for young people, and are less gory than some accounts, Yanek’s later experiences bear a closer resemblance to Elie Wiesel’s Night than more middle-grade offerings, such as Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars. It may well support classroom work with adult review first.

A bone-chilling tale not to be ignored by the universe. (Historical fiction. 12 & up)