A teenager frees himself from his older brother's surreptitious abuse and his own physical deformities in this psychological thriller. After years of enduring nocturnal taunts, Joseph has grown to despise his twisted, seizure-prone body and brother Seb in equal measure; watching the boats off shore and in the local boatyard provide his only comfort. When, to his delight, an old boatwright wills him a small sailboat, Joseph discovers his ability to anticipate, and even control, wind and wave. He wins several races, infuriating Seb, who attempts to murder Joseph. Does Joseph hate Seb enough to kill him? After engineering an accident that leaves Seb close to death, he realizes that he has committed an evil act. In a wrenching final scene, Joseph finds peace by trading his own life for Seb's, a resolution more shocking than just. Bowler becomes a different writer when his characters are on the water, envisioning and describing races and other marine episodes more vividly than incidents on land. Joseph is a compelling figure, unable to read or write, virtually unable to speak, but sharply alert and—in the course of his first-person narration—articulate about his feelings. Seb is less convincing, not as scary as the publically genial, privately vicious abusers in books such as Kristen Randle's The Only Alien On the Planet (1994), but that hardly detracts from this unsettling work. (Fiction. 11-15)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-689-80115-7
Page Count: 159
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
At the end of the term, a new student who is black and Vietnamese finds a morsel of hope that she too will find a place in...
This is almost like a play for 18 voices, as Grimes (Stepping Out with Grandma Mac, not reviewed, etc.) moves her narration among a group of high school students in the Bronx.
The English teacher, Mr. Ward, accepts a set of poems from Wesley, his response to a month of reading poetry from the Harlem Renaissance. Soon there’s an open-mike poetry reading, sponsored by Mr. Ward, every month, and then later, every week. The chapters in the students’ voices alternate with the poems read by that student, defiant, shy, terrified. All of them, black, Latino, white, male, and female, talk about the unease and alienation endemic to their ages, and they do it in fresh and appealing voices. Among them: Janelle, who is tired of being called fat; Leslie, who finds friendship in another who has lost her mom; Diondra, who hides her art from her father; Tyrone, who has faith in words and in his “moms”; Devon, whose love for books and jazz gets jeers. Beyond those capsules are rich and complex teens, and their tentative reaching out to each other increases as through the poems they also find more of themselves. Steve writes: “But hey! Joy / is not a crime, though / some people / make it seem so.”
At the end of the term, a new student who is black and Vietnamese finds a morsel of hope that she too will find a place in the poetry. (Fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8037-2569-8
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
Though it lacks references or suggestions for further reading, Arn's agonizing story is compelling enough that many readers...
A harrowing tale of survival in the Killing Fields.
The childhood of Arn Chorn-Pond has been captured for young readers before, in Michelle Lord and Shino Arihara's picture book, A Song for Cambodia (2008). McCormick, known for issue-oriented realism, offers a fictionalized retelling of Chorn-Pond's youth for older readers. McCormick's version begins when the Khmer Rouge marches into 11-year-old Arn's Cambodian neighborhood and forces everyone into the country. Arn doesn't understand what the Khmer Rouge stands for; he only knows that over the next several years he and the other children shrink away on a handful of rice a day, while the corpses of adults pile ever higher in the mango grove. Arn does what he must to survive—and, wherever possible, to protect a small pocket of children and adults around him. Arn's chilling history pulls no punches, trusting its readers to cope with the reality of children forced to participate in murder, torture, sexual exploitation and genocide. This gut-wrenching tale is marred only by the author's choice to use broken English for both dialogue and description. Chorn-Pond, in real life, has spoken eloquently (and fluently) on the influence he's gained by learning English; this prose diminishes both his struggle and his story.
Though it lacks references or suggestions for further reading, Arn's agonizing story is compelling enough that many readers will seek out the history themselves. (preface, author's note) (Historical fiction. 12-15)Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-173093-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 20, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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