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THE GOOD BRAIDER

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

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ALICE ON BOARD

From the Alice McKinley series , Vol. 27

Readers who have been along with Alice on her journey from the start will enjoy this latest installment in a reliable series...

Alice and her friends take summer jobs aboard a cruise ship on the Chesapeake Bay following graduation.

Thrilled with the nearly two-to-one ratio of guys to girls that makes up for the low pay and drudgery of galley duty, Alice makes the most of her summer before college. She's torn between missing Patrick, who's in Barcelona, and enjoying flirtatious outings with Mitch, a 20-ish crew member who's taking the summer off from trapping muskrats in the Maryland marshes. Dramatic episodes large and small fill the weeks on the refurbished Seascape. A passenger accuses Alice of stealing her watch; another gets his kicks exposing himself when she comes to clean his room. A bee sting lands Liz in the hospital; Gwen breaks up with Austin and has her own shipboard romance. Pamela's needy, troubled mother arrives during the same week that her father and his girlfriend are on board. A rather old-fashioned plot with a tone of comfortable familiarity mixes with a smattering of innuendo and scatological humor. Alice observes it all from her place on the verge of adulthood, pondering what the future holds for her as she looks back over her life so far.

Readers who have been along with Alice on her journey from the start will enjoy this latest installment in a reliable series as it begins to wind down . (Fiction. 13-15)

Pub Date: May 22, 2012

ISBN: 978-1-4424-4588-8

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Atheneum

Review Posted Online: March 27, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012

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CHASING THE SKIP

A solid cast and heartfelt emotions lift this above its contrivances

"Dad thinks if you have a kid, you should pay child support. Paying for them is the law, but spending time with them isn't."

That's what aspiring journalist Ricki writes her first day riding shotgun with her bounty-hunter father. It's the first time in her life she's spent appreciable time with him, so she writes from the heart. They are only together because her feckless mother has taken off—again—and her grandmother got tired of putting her up. She used to tell herself stories of the exciting life her father led, inventing a mythology to explain his absence, but it turns out, he's just been a jerk. Bail-bond enforcement is a lot duller than reality TV suggests, but the adrenaline starts flowing when Ricki strikes up a conversation with "skip" Ian, who has jumped bail on a grand theft auto count. In seemingly no time, the charismatic teen has slipped his cuffs and stolen Ricki's dad's truck. The ensuing caper is a gentle one, a road trip calculated to give Ricki time to get to know her dad and achieve an understanding of herself and her family. She is an appealingly vulnerable character, her anger at both parents and her love for her mother both genuine and leading to completely believable choices, however wrongheaded.

A solid cast and heartfelt emotions lift this above its contrivances . (Fiction. 13-15)

Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-8050-9391-9

Page Count: 240

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: Aug. 7, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2012

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