When Lu Si-Yan’s father dies and her mother suffers a breakdown, her selfish, old-fashioned Uncle sells her to the wealthy Chen family as a servant. Barely 12 and inexperienced, Lu Si-Yan’s slave-labor is recognized as illegal by the Chen grandmother, who gives her money and helps her leave. After the money is stolen, the girl’s naïve innocence lets her fall into the trap of factory life, complete with unfair labor practices, compulsory overtime, withheld wages in a prison-like setting that offers room and board for unbearably long work days and nights. Grindley gives an eye-opening view at modern entrepreneurial China within the sweatshop environment of a toy factory. Her protagonist matures in the company of selfish, exploitive adults who take advantage of her youth and needy circumstances and some conscientiously courageous individuals like the Chen’s grandmother, their cook, and fellow factory worker and surrogate sister, Li Mei. Their support provides a source of strength and justice to aid in her return home. A well-developed page-turner with a somewhat idealistic ending as Uncle welcomes Lu Si-Yan home, ever remorseful for his role in her harsh, difficult life and her mother’s ultimate death. (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-58234-937-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2004
Reading like a long term paper, this dry, abstract recitation of teams and players brings neither the game nor the people who played and are playing it to life. McKissack (with Patricia C. McKissack, Black Diamond, 1994, not reviewed, etc.) opens with a chapter on basketball’s invention and original rules, closes with a look at women’s basketball, and in between chronicles the growth of amateur, college, and pro ball, adding clipped quotes, technical observations about changing styles of play and vague comments about how players black and white respected each other. The information is evidently drawn entirely from previously published books and interviews. A modest selection of black-and-white photographs give faces to some of the many names the author drops, but readers won’t find much more about individual players beyond an occasional biographical or statistical tidbit. McKissack frequently points to parallels in the history of African Americans in basketball and in baseball, but this account comes off as sketchy and unfocused compared to Black Diamond. (glossary, bibliography, index) (Nonfiction. 12-14)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-590-48712-4
Page Count: 148
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A wry sequel to The Silent Treatment (1988): here, summer jobs put high-school seniors Ricky and Nate through a mystery from the past, as well as through some timeless rites of passage. Having to clean toilets and listen to gloomy, sex-obsessed Norman the Foreman seems like a fair exchange for a free stay at Quiver Lake resort, especially with all the college women around; Nate moves into hot (and eventually successful) pursuit of a Berkeley student, but Ricky is more inclined to watch from a distance. Meanwhile, what appear to be new but genuine artifacts of the long-integrated Miwok tribe begin to turn up, and Ricky almost loses his life in a primitive deer trap. Is there still a Miwok alive in the wild? Or, as someone suggests, is it the spirit of a young Miwok who never completed his manhood ritual and is unable to find the Aimah, an anthropomorphic rock formation? Carkeet's characters are portrayed sympathetically but broadly enough to keep the story light. The climax is big and dramatic: Ricky wakes one morning to find that the whole lake has suddenly drained away, exposing not only a field of slick mud but the Aimah, with piles of warm ashes at its crotch and armpits. There's no ghost to be seen, but readers can draw their own conclusions. (Fiction. 12-15)
Pub Date: Oct. 30, 1991
ISBN: 0-06-022453-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1991
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