When Yancy’s older brother threatens Yancy’s horse Shy, running away seems the only answer. For all of Yancy’s 15 years, he confides to his journal, he’s felt threatened by Will, his Conduct Disorder–diagnosed brother. To protect Shy, Yancy flees into the California wilderness with the horse. After an educational bout of hard labor assisting the Mexican ranch hand Tavo (who returns to Veracruz and vanishes from Yancy’s consciousness once he’s served his narrative purpose), Yancy is returned home. With his brother increasingly violent and his parents impotent, it’s only a matter of time until someone is seriously hurt. All’s well that ends well—at least for Yancy, who gets a girlfriend, a safe home for his horse and his parents to himself. Too bad for Will, who gets committed to a facility where he’s drugged to the gills. Huang’s cartoons add spice and verisimilitude to Yancy’s journal, despite the distractions of a handwriting-style typeface. The tale’s many weaknesses are made up for by Yancy’s engaging writing style, alternating adolescent poems, narrative and comics. (Fiction. 13-15)
Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4231-1898-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
Refreshing and moving: avoids easy answers and saviors from the outside.
From Sudan to Maine, in free verse.
It's 1999 in Juba, and the second Sudanese civil war is in full swing. Viola is a Bari girl, and she lives every day in fear of the government soldiers occupying her town. In brief free-verse chapters, Viola makes Juba real: the dusty soil, the memories of sweetened condensed milk, the afternoons Viola spends braiding her cousin's hair. But there is more to Juba than family and hunger; there are the soldiers, and the danger, and the horrifying interactions with soldiers that Viola doesn't describe but only lets the reader infer. As soon as possible, Viola's mother takes the family to Cairo and then to Portland, Maine—but they won't all make it. First one and then another family member is brought down by the devastating war and famine. After such a journey, the culture shock in Portland is unsurprisingly overwhelming. "Portland to New York: 234 miles, / New York to Cairo: 5,621 miles, / Cairo to Juba: 1,730 miles." Viola tries to become an American girl, with some help from her Sudanese friends, a nice American boy and the requisite excellent teacher. But her mother, like the rest of the Sudanese elders, wants to run her home as if she were back in Juba, and the inevitable conflict is heartbreaking.
Refreshing and moving: avoids easy answers and saviors from the outside. (historical note) (Fiction. 13-15)Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7614-6267-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Marshall Cavendish
Review Posted Online: May 1, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
Namioka (Den of the White Fox, 1997, etc.) offers readers a glimpse of the ritual of foot-binding, and a surprising heroine whose life is determined by her rejection of that ritual. Ailin is spirited—her family thinks uncontrollable—even at age five, in her family’s compound in China in 1911, she doesn’t want to have her feet bound, especially after Second Sister shows Ailin her own bound feet and tells her how much it hurts. Ailin can see already how bound feet will restrict her movements, and prevent her from running and playing. Her father takes the revolutionary step of permitting her to leave her feet alone, even though the family of Ailin’s betrothed then breaks off the engagement. Ailin goes to the missionary school and learns English; when her father dies and her uncle cuts off funds for tuition, she leaves her family to become a nanny for an American missionary couple’s children. She learns all the daily household chores that were done by servants in her own home, and finds herself, painfully, cut off from her own culture and separate from the Americans. At 16, she decides to go with the missionaries when they return to San Francisco, where she meets and marries another Chinese immigrant who starts his own restaurant. The metaphor of things bound and unbound is a ribbon winding through this vivid narrative; the story moves swiftly, while Ailin is a brave and engaging heroine whose difficult choices reflect her time and her gender. (Fiction. 9-14)
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-32666-1
Page Count: 154
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
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