A vividly written historical novel by a promising new voice.
Two sisters must learn to take care of each other in Lindstedt’s debut novel for children.
In 1960s rural Texas, African American siblings Sandy Forte and her sister, Glory, navigate a world of segregation, abandonment, and poverty in this collection of loosely connected stories and parables. Readers experience Sandy’s first memory at age 3 at her grandmother’s small cottage in Hooks, Texas, on the day their mother departs for Chicago. The same day, Sandy is injured in a traumatic lawn-mowing accident, and her sister stops speaking. Sandy is tended and nurtured by her grandmother, who reads her Bible verses each night and sews dolls from a rag pile. Like the tales Grandma spins, Sandy’s stories seem to dance along the line between fiction and truth. For example, when she swallows a firefly on a dare, the insect becomes a metaphor for an inner light—an intuition that Grandma helped activate. A few years later, Sandy and Glory take an epic train ride to Chicago, where bullies, and their mother, Janetta Mae, await them. Their busy, distracted mom juggles a job, a pregnancy, and her boyfriend’s three children. Sandy, left to her own devices, must clear life’s hurdles on her own. She gets into a vicious fight with a schoolteacher, plots to get even with a bully, and finds a way to take a school field trip thanks to a lucky break. Despite the odds, Sandy always finds a way to come out on top. Overall, the novel’s plot feels thin, and several characters are introduced only to be abandoned. However, Lindstedt’s vibrant, poetic prose overcomes these flaws. Her descriptions of the Texas setting are particularly winning: “The sky was black as blood pudding, but our front yard was filled with swarming lights.” The text is filled with other, similarly sensory-heightening sentences: “Crickets were having some kind of a party, dancing and singing in the grass outside my window.” Each chapter begins with a poem that reads like an entry from Sandy’s personal diary, and folksy, black-and-white illustrations by Groat and Hall are also included.
A vividly written historical novel by a promising new voice.Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2020
ISBN: 979-8-67-913332-7
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A promising fiction debut.
Family secrets, an unsolved bank robbery, summer on a lake, a treasure island and a first romance are the ingredients for this inviting middle-grade mystery.
Unhappy with his new life and new stepfather in Southern California, 13-year-old Trav runs away to the small town in Minnesota where his dad grew up and his grandmother lives. He quickly learns why his mother won’t talk about his father, who died before he was born. Suspected of having robbed a local bank, the man disappeared in a storm, his boat washed up on an island in the lake. Everyone figures Trav knows where the money is, a theory confirmed when some of the burgled money turns up in local stores after his arrival. Trav manages to convince neighbor kid Kenny and his hot cousin Iz of his innocence, and together, they try to figure out where the loot might have been stashed and who has sent Trav a threatening note. Careful plotting and end-of-chapter cliffhangers add to the suspense. The first-person narration suggests that Trav’s imagination has been fed by too much television, but the imagined threats become frighteningly real as the story progresses. Trav’s voice is believable, Bullard’s Minnesota setting full of convincing detail, and the boy’s hesitant romantic efforts add a pleasant embellishment.
A promising fiction debut. (Mystery. 9-12)Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-544-02900-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 13, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
Both an excellent, inclusive narration of important historical events and a fast-paced, entertaining read.
Gratz (Refugee, 2017, etc.) weaves together fictionalized accounts of individual experiences of D-Day, the “beginning of the end of the Second World War.”
The action begins just before dawn on June 6, 1944, and ends near midnight that same day. Six different operations in settings across Europe, each fictionalized with imagined characters but based on true events, exemplify the ordinary people in extraordinary situations who risked or gave their lives to destroy what Gen. Eisenhower styled “the German war machine” and “Nazi tyranny.” The narrative moves from scene to scene as the day marches on—a sea invasion, French citizens and Resistance fighters on land, and soldiers arriving by air—but repeatedly returns to Dee, a German fighting on the American side and hiding his German identity from comrades like Sid, a Jewish American determined to wipe out the Germans even as he suffers insults from his peers. The vigorously diverse cast is historically accurate but unusual for a World War II novel, including a young Algerian woman, a white Canadian, a Cree First Nations lance corporal from Quebec, British soldiers, a black American medic, and a Frenchwoman. The horrors of war and the decisions and emotions it entails are presented with unflinching honesty through characters readers can feel for. In the end, all the threads come together to drive home the point that allies are “stronger together.”
Both an excellent, inclusive narration of important historical events and a fast-paced, entertaining read. (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-338-24572-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2019
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