A poignant tale of friendship with realistic and admirable young characters facing some of life’s most difficult and complex...
A young boy and his sick mother find family and refuge in Idaho.
“My mom’s sick. She needs help. I don’t know where she thinks she’s taking us, but we will probably die together there” is what young Jacob Lance wants to tell strangers at the Sacramento bus station. He has followed his silent mother there, who is later revealed to be suffering from severe clinical depression, and accompanies her as she wordlessly purchases tickets to take them both to Shoney, Idaho. Once they arrive in the small farming community, she wordlessly leads them to the house of Old John and Gert, their last living relatives and the first family Jacob has ever known. The gruff Uncle John spends more time with cows than people, but he quickly reveals a soft understanding and love for his nephew. Jacob helps John with the cows, becoming familiar for the first time with manure and early mornings, while his mother begins her slow recovery. Meanwhile, Jacob finds the small rural school quite different from the city life he knew. In particular, a spritely girl with yellow hair named Lace catches his attention and starts showing up at the dairy every morning, despite Uncle John’s assessment that the girl “runs wild around town like a stray cat.” As Lace and Jacob’s bond grows deeper, she begins to spark new life in the boy’s mother. This stirs both hope and jealousy in Jacob—just one of many complicated and deeply nuanced conflicts to arise as these two young people confront mental illness, death, and the failings of their caretakers. Like Sharon Creech’s classic YA novel Walk Two Moons, which handles similar issues against the stark backdrop of the American West, this book does not shy away from tough subject matter or wrap up the tale with a tidy, perfect conclusion. Anderson (Joey and the Magic Map, 2013) gives readers two fully realized central characters who deal with sad, painful events as best they can, sometimes even wrongly, creating a story about extraordinary childhood struggles that feels very powerful and very real.
A poignant tale of friendship with realistic and admirable young characters facing some of life’s most difficult and complex issues.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5170-1599-2
Page Count: 234
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Bulky, balky, talky.
In an updated quest for the Holy Grail, the narrative pace remains stuck in slo-mo.
But is the Grail, in fact, holy? Turns out that’s a matter of perspective. If you’re a member of that most secret of clandestine societies, the Priory of Sion, you think yes. But if your heart belongs to the Roman Catholic Church, the Grail is more than just unholy, it’s downright subversive and terrifying. At least, so the story goes in this latest of Brown’s exhaustively researched, underimagined treatise-thrillers (Deception Point, 2001, etc.). When Harvard professor of symbology Robert Langdon—in Paris to deliver a lecture—has his sleep interrupted at two a.m., it’s to discover that the police suspect he’s a murderer, the victim none other than Jacques Saumière, esteemed curator of the Louvre. The evidence against Langdon could hardly be sketchier, but the cops feel huge pressure to make an arrest. And besides, they don’t particularly like Americans. Aided by the murdered man’s granddaughter, Langdon flees the flics to trudge the Grail-path along with pretty, persuasive Sophie, who’s driven by her own need to find answers. The game now afoot amounts to a scavenger hunt for the scholarly, clues supplied by the late curator, whose intent was to enlighten Sophie and bedevil her enemies. It’s not all that easy to identify these enemies. Are they emissaries from the Vatican, bent on foiling the Grail-seekers? From Opus Dei, the wayward, deeply conservative Catholic offshoot bent on foiling everybody? Or any one of a number of freelancers bent on a multifaceted array of private agendas? For that matter, what exactly is the Priory of Sion? What does it have to do with Leonardo? With Mary Magdalene? With (gulp) Walt Disney? By the time Sophie and Langdon reach home base, everything—well, at least more than enough—has been revealed.
Bulky, balky, talky.Pub Date: March 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50420-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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