Wisely using only real people and sticking close to the actual events of Shackleton’s ill-fated expedition, McKernan does justice to one of the past century’s great true adventure stories. Those events are as dramatic as it comes, as readers of Jennifer Armstrong’s Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World (1998) or Elizabeth Cody Kimmel’s Ice Story (1999) will attest. Setting out in 1914 to cross Antarctica, Shackleton and 27 men were trapped by ice that eventually destroyed their ship and left them huddled together, barely sheltered from the elements, for 22 months. Teenaged wanderer Perce Blackborow provides the point of view; hoping to measure himself against both nature and his fellow men, he stows away—and finds himself facing harder tests to his courage, spirit, and physical endurance than he’d ever imagined. The author smoothly integrates invented but credible banter and tensions, adds full measures of excitement, terror, boredom, pain, and exhaustion, then closes with sketches of each major participant’s later life, plus several resource lists. A compelling alternative to the nonfiction accounts. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Feb. 8, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-82691-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
Loosely connected to historical events, this tale of a 17th-century English town that isolated itself to prevent the plague from spreading celebrates selfless courage, but it does so at some distance, and within the confines of a contrived, ordinary story. Daughter of a prosperous, bookish squire, Nell Bullen has enjoyed an idyllic upbringing, and despite confirmed rumors of plague, eagerly accompanies her father to London when he is inducted into the Royal Academy. Guided by the up-and-coming Samuel Pepys, Nell tours the city, avoiding the plague-ridden districts until by mischance she witnesses a horrifying mass burial. Sobered, she returns to Branford, not long before the local tailor takes ill. Viewed largely from the distant safety of the manor house, the townfolks’ principled decision to stay put rather than flee, and their subsequent suffering, will seem a remote catastrophe to readers, and Nell’s stilted narrative style (“Among our visitors from London was a singular young man whom I misjudged completely at the start,”) gives this the artificiality of a formula romance. Though the act from which this story springs merits commemoration, the inner and outer devastation wrought by disease is more vividly captured in Cynthia DeFelice’s Apprenticeship of Lucas Whittaker (1996) and Anna Myers’s Graveyard Girl (1995). (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8037-2393-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1999
Pulled in different directions by her heart and by family duty, a daughter of the noble Fujiwara clan also has an angry ghost to appease in this busy sequel to Little Sister (1996). Two years after Mitsuko entered the land of the dead in search of her sister’s soul, ominous dreams remind her of her vow to repair a small shrine in which she once took refuge. At the same time, her father announces that Mitsuko is to marry an 11- year-old prince. She once again calls on Goranu, the mischievous, immortal shape-changer who fell in love with her. Exchanging insults and tart retorts, the two grow closer as Mitsuko faces a dragon, the shrine’s vengeful kami (spirit), and a host of other supernatural beings. Under Goranu’s tutelage, Mitsuko learns how to use her wits, and by the end has overcome the treacherous kami, helped engineer the prince’s marriage to her sister, and even met Lord Emma-O in the Court of the Dead. More than most sequels, this story relies on knowledge of its predecessor. Dalkey supplies a glossary and historical postscript, but readers unfamiliar with the first book will miss nuances in characters and relationships, and have only a sketchy picture of the 12th- century locales and social patterns. Together, however, the two novels combine a courageous teenager’s well-articulated escape from the limits and preconceptions forced on her by a rigid, highly structured upbringing with a colorful, not altogether earnest, series of encounters with powerful beings from Buddhist and Shinto lore. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-15-201652-X
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1998
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