A richly satisfying story saturated with color, adventure, and heart.
The lives of a boy and a captured polar bear intertwine in this middle-grade historical novel.
Historic documents show that 13th-century king Henry III of England kept a “pale bear” in his menagerie in the Tower of London, a gift from King Haakon IV of Norway. Fletcher takes this spare fact and embroiders a stupendous coming-of-age tale stuffed with adventure and laced with deeper questions. Her protagonist is 12-year-old Arthur, a Welsh-born boy who has run away from the farm in Norway where he lives with his mother, bullying stepbrothers, and tyrannical stepfather to try to get back to Wales to claim his birthright. A series of believable circumstances moves Arthur onto the ship transporting the polar bear to England after King Haakon’s disgraced doctor—who is charged with delivering the gift safely or else—discovers that Arthur is able to soothe the bear. Heart-pounding adventures involving shipwreck, pirates, and escape combine with themes of belonging, trust, loyalty, and freedom to keep readers swiftly turning the pages, while the exquisite worldbuilding details will make them feel they are sailing aboard a Scandinavian keel or walking the streets of 13th-century London and Bergen. Fletcher brings the story to a poignant but not fairy-tale-happy ending, suffused as it is by the mature (so apt for a coming-of-age story) questions raised about what freedom actually is. All characters appear to be white.
A richly satisfying story saturated with color, adventure, and heart. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5344-2077-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: July 23, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2018
Fans of Love That Dog (2001) and Hate That Cat (2010) will find much to love in this story of a girl, a cow, and so much...
Newbery Medalist Creech touches on themes of loss, friendship, and belonging in this appealing tale of a young girl’s unlikely relationship with Zora, an enormous belted Galloway.
When 12-year-old Reena’s parents lose their newspaper jobs in the big city, they decide to change the flight plan of their lives and move to a small coastal town in Maine. Reena and her brother, Luke, “a seven-year-old complexity,” are volunteered by their mother to help Mrs. Falala, an elderly and ostensibly cantankerous woman whose menagerie of animals includes a pig named Paulie, a cat named China, a snake named Edna, and the ornery, stubborn, slobbering, bellowing cow, Zora. Soon Luke is teaching Mrs. Falala to draw, and Reena is preparing to show Zora at the upcoming fair. The book’s playful use of words sets this novel apart. Not only does Creech seamlessly intersperse prose and poetry, but the design manipulates typeface, font, setting, and spacing to paint word-pictures, in some instances creating concrete poetry while in others emphasizing a few words on the page—an accentuation that makes the story come alive and deftly communicates the range of emotions, from humor to sorrow, that the story conveys. Luke, Reena, and most of their new neighbors are likely white; Beat, an older girl who helps Reena learn about cows, is dark-skinned.
Fans of Love That Dog (2001) and Hate That Cat (2010) will find much to love in this story of a girl, a cow, and so much more. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Aug. 30, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-241524-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
Hidden throughout this moving novel in verse, old stories are discovered like buried treasures.
When a Penacook girl and her grandparents must shelter in place at the beginning of the Covid-19 outbreak, a large dog mysteriously appears to protect them.
Malian’s winter stay with her grandparents is extended when everything is locked down. A big dog with two white spots over his eyes shows up at their house on the reservation. “Four-eyed dog,” her grandmother calls him. They name him Malsum, meaning “wolf,” and he makes himself at home. “When a dog like / that just appears / and chooses you, / it’s not your decision.” Although Malian misses her parents in Boston and online classes are difficult due to the poor internet connection, her grandparents entertain her with stories. She finds that even when she’s hearing one again, there’s “always / something in that story / that was more.” Her grandfather tells her “that all the old stories / are so alive / that even when you hear / one of them again, / that story may decide / to show you / something new.” Bruchac (Abenaki) tenderly braids traditional Wabanaki stories and, via Malian’s family history, stories of atrocities visited on Native nations into Malian’s lockdown experience. As early spring turns to summer and Malsum makes himself part of the family, she turns these stories into a school presentation, a process that helps her realize that, like her grandparents and the big dog, she’s “a rez dog too.”
Hidden throughout this moving novel in verse, old stories are discovered like buried treasures. (Verse fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 8, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-32621-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 4, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
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