In a first novel set “in a country in the Balkans,” an 11-year-old girl suffers the loss of her parents, then lives through a series of brutal events. After her parents are swept away by a flooded bridge, Tanya tells herself that they will come back, and begins to bake muffins from her mother’s recipe. Her efforts bring appreciative neighbors, then paying customers, then outlandishly jealous women from the village, who, Menick implies, think that their husbands are visiting Tanya too often. She trusts no one; when friendly Pavel suggests that the gypsies have ruined her orchard, digging for buried money, Tanya knows that he is the one who has made the holes, damaging tree roots. She is under siege, real and emotional, for as she accepts that her parents are dead, she must face those who covet her farm and home. A knife-sharpener, Anton, is her only friend, but he “borrows” the village idiot, hoping that angry villagers will think the gypsies are behind the boy’s disappearance, and murder them. With stiff dialogue and grotesque events—the bloody decapitation of a chicken, a barn-burning, the sharpener’s attempted murder of Tanya, and his own gory death, a description of gangrene and amputation—driving the story more than character or plotting, this novel never meshes. It opens as a compelling and unusual story of a strongly delineated child survivor, then loses force as people’s actions become staged and unbelievable. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-23303-2
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
Themes of freedom and responsibility twine between the lines of this short but heavy novel from the author of Because of Winn-Dixie (2000). Three months after his mother's death, Rob and his father are living in a small-town Florida motel, each nursing sharp, private pain. On the same day Rob has two astonishing encounters: first, he stumbles upon a caged tiger in the woods behind the motel; then he meets Sistine, a new classmate responding to her parents' breakup with ready fists and a big chip on her shoulder. About to burst with his secret, Rob confides in Sistine, who instantly declares that the tiger must be freed. As Rob quickly develops a yen for Sistine's company that gives her plenty of emotional leverage, and the keys to the cage almost literally drop into his hands, credible plotting plainly takes a back seat to character delineation here. And both struggle for visibility beneath a wagonload of symbol and metaphor: the real tiger (and the inevitable recitation of Blake's poem); the cage; Rob's dream of Sistine riding away on the beast's back; a mysterious skin condition on Rob's legs that develops after his mother's death; a series of wooden figurines that he whittles; a larger-than-life African-American housekeeper at the motel who dispenses wisdom with nearly every utterance; and the climax itself, which is signaled from the start. It's all so freighted with layers of significance that, like Lois Lowry's Gathering Blue (2000), Anne Mazer's Oxboy (1995), or, further back, Julia Cunningham's Dorp Dead (1965), it becomes more an exercise in analysis than a living, breathing story. Still, the tiger, "burning bright" with magnificent, feral presence, does make an arresting central image. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-7636-0911-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2001
BOOK TO SCREEN
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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