ALONE YET NOT ALONE

Name: ALONE YET NOT ALONE
Author: Tracy Leininger Craven
ISBN: 978-0-310-73053-8

by Tracy Leininger Craven ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 26, 2012

A potentially fascinating story of the survival of a powerful, sustaining human spirit is too often bogged down by an...

bookshelf

During the French and Indian War, Native Americans capture two sisters, 12-year-old Barbara and 9-year-old Regina, from their frontier Pennsylvania farm.

The sisters are separated within days of being taken captive. The third-person narration follows Barbara: her long overland journey, then her life as a captive and eventually, an almost fully accepted member of the Allegheny tribe. Having never given up hope, after three years, Barbara and three other teens flee, embarking on a perilous 200-mile-long escape across the Ohio River and back to the safety of Fort Pitt. From the outset, this tale reads almost as a parable, the introduction intoning, "a handful of families came to dwell there. They lived happily in harmony both with God and man—even with the Indians." Because of its relative brevity and the sometimes distancing didacticism of the narrative, the full impact of Barbara's trials is often blunted. Although Native Americans are sometimes sympathetically depicted, they never become much more than pidgin-speaking cardboard characters. A final moral/religious lesson in the form of Barbara’s later reaction to a good-hearted potential suitor seems superfluous. I Am Regina (1991) tells the same story, more sympathetically.

A potentially fascinating story of the survival of a powerful, sustaining human spirit is too often bogged down by an intrusively preachy narrative voice that never trusts readers to draw their own appropriate conclusions. (Historical fiction. 11-16)

Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2012

ISBN: 978-0-310-73053-8

Page Count: 160

Publisher: Zonderkidz

Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012

Categories:

CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION

bookshelf

DUST OF EDEN

by Mariko Nagai ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2014

An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American...

bookshelf

Crystal-clear prose poems paint a heart-rending picture of 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa’s journey from Seattle to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.

This vividly wrought story of displacement, told from Mina’s first-person perspective, begins as it did for so many Japanese-Americans: with the bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. The backlash of her Seattle community is instantaneous (“Jap, Jap, Jap, the word bounces / around the walls of the hall”), and Mina chronicles its effects on her family with a heavy heart. “I am an American, I scream / in my head, but my mouth is stuffed / with rocks; my body is a stone, like the statue / of a little Buddha Grandpa prays to.” When Roosevelt decrees that West Coast Japanese-Americans are to be imprisoned in inland camps, the Tagawas board up their house, leaving the cat, Grandpa’s roses and Mina’s best friend behind. Following the Tagawas from Washington’s Puyallup Assembly Center to Idaho’s Minidoka Relocation Center (near the titular town of Eden), the narrative continues in poems and letters. In them, injustices such as endless camp lines sit alongside even larger ones, such as the government’s asking interned young men, including Mina’s brother, to fight for America.

An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American internment. (historical note) (Verse/historical fiction. 11-14)

Pub Date: March 1, 2014

ISBN: 978-0-8075-1739-0

Page Count: 128

Publisher: Whitman

Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014

Categories:

CHILDREN'S FAMILY | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION

bookshelf

RESISTANCE

by Jennifer A. Nielsen ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 28, 2018

Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch.

bookshelf

A Jewish girl joins up with Polish resistance groups to fight for her people against the evils of the Holocaust.

Chaya Lindner is forcibly separated from her family when they are consigned to the Jewish ghetto in Krakow. The 16-year-old is taken in by the leaders of Akiva, a fledgling Jewish resistance group that offers her the opportunity to become a courier, using her fair coloring to pass for Polish and sneak into ghettos to smuggle in supplies and information. Chaya’s missions quickly become more dangerous, taking her on a perilous journey from a disastrous mission in Krakow to the ghastly ghetto of Lodz and eventually to Warsaw to aid the Jews there in their gathering uprising inside the walls of the ghetto. Through it all, she is partnered with a secretive young girl whom she is reluctant to trust. The trajectory of the narrative skews toward the sensational, highlighting moments of resistance via cinematic action sequences but not pausing to linger on the emotional toll of the Holocaust’s atrocities. Younger readers without sufficient historical knowledge may not appreciate the gravity of the events depicted. The principal characters lack depth, and their actions and the situations they find themselves in often require too much suspension of disbelief to pass for realism.

Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch. (afterword) (Historical fiction. 12-16)