Readers with a ferocious love of animals will know they’ve found a kindred spirit.
Hypersensitive Clarice isn’t just vegan—her empathy for animals runs so deep that she becomes physically ill after witnessing their injury.
She’s plagued by intrusive thoughts of the pain they’ve encountered, and life is difficult, since she can’t come to terms with the necessity or inevitability of death—she won’t drive for fear of running over a frog. Clarice’s brusque first-person narration and the stiffly expository dialogue underscore the rigidity of her internal code. She’s at loose ends in her junior year of high school when she secures a volunteer internship at an iguana sanctuary on Grand Cayman, where she meets other committed animal lovers who help her expand her perspectives on cruelty and the brutality of the natural world, bringing some gray to her black-and-white universe. Short scenes lurch along at a disorienting, elliptical pace, so that what would normally be big plot points, like selecting, applying to and being accepted into the college of her choice, take very few pages. It’s hard to feel connected to many of the human characters as they’re broadly drawn; the iguanas, by contrast, come off with greater depth, underscoring Clarice’s intense attachment. Clarice’s distress and the descriptions of animal suffering (based on real events) are communicated all too clearly and are leavened by too few moments of humor, making this a book that’s not for everyone.
Readers with a ferocious love of animals will know they’ve found a kindred spirit. (author’s note) (Fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: March 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60898-157-1
Page Count: 177
Publisher: Namelos
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Well-educated American boys from privileged families have abundant options for college and career. For Chiko, their Burmese counterpart, there are no good choices. There is never enough to eat, and his family lives in constant fear of the military regime that has imprisoned Chiko’s physician father. Soon Chiko is commandeered by the army, trained to hunt down members of the Karenni ethnic minority. Tai, another “recruit,” uses his streetwise survival skills to help them both survive. Meanwhile, Tu Reh, a Karenni youth whose village was torched by the Burmese Army, has been chosen for his first military mission in his people’s resistance movement. How the boys meet and what comes of it is the crux of this multi-voiced novel. While Perkins doesn’t sugarcoat her subject—coming of age in a brutal, fascistic society—this is a gentle story with a lot of heart, suitable for younger readers than the subject matter might suggest. It answers the question, “What is it like to be a child soldier?” clearly, but with hope. (author’s note, historical note) (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: July 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-58089-328-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Charlesbridge
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2010
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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