Claudine, a French Jewish girl, goes to live with relatives in America during WWII, shortly after her eighth birthday. As a gift, she had received Violette, a doll onto whose cape she had sewn a tiny yellow star, the hated symbol all Jews had been forced to wear. After a shipboard fire, Claudine loses her belongings, including Violette. Eventually, her father joins her in New York and brings the terrible news of her mother’s death. At war’s end, Claudine and Papa return to France, hoping to reclaim their lives, but they no longer feel at home there. She and Papa move back to New York and Claudine, a skilled writer, continues to pen stories. Then comes a wonderful surprise. This tender offering for younger readers would have been more affecting had McDonough not told it from an adult’s viewpoint; her coolly detached present-tense voice distances readers from Claudine’s tale. Root’s gentle, delicate paintings balance the grim realities. (Fiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8050-6337-4
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
Readers will find a powerful window into the past and, unfortunately, a way-too-accurate mirror of the present.
A quiet but stirring historical novel about the awkward, thrilling, and often painful moments that make middle school a pivotal time.
It’s 1971, and best friends Jamila, Josie, and Francesca are excited to start seventh grade. But when their school district decides to bus the students in their northern Queens neighborhood to a middle school in predominantly black southern Queens in an attempt to desegregate New York City schools, their trio threatens to fall apart. Though their multicultural identities in a predominantly white neighborhood have united them in the past—Jamila is white and Bajan, Josie is Latinx and Jamaican, Francesca is black and white—their families’ and community’s divisions over the new policy chip away at their camaraderie. Along with all of the usual adolescent milestones, including first love, juggling old friendships and new, and moments of burgeoning independence from parents, Budhos deftly explores the tensions that pulled at the seams of the fraught and divided city during this time. Jamila’s narration is thoughtful, capturing the growing pains of seventh grade and the injustices, big and small, that young adolescents face. She portrays with nuance the ways multiracial identities, socio-economic status, microaggressions, and interracial relationships can impact and shape identity.
Readers will find a powerful window into the past and, unfortunately, a way-too-accurate mirror of the present. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-553-53422-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Wendy Lamb/Random
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
PROFILES
A strong-willed young woman pursues her educational dreams in this Andy Hardy–esque tale of a rural school in peril, circa 1925. When Miss Fletcher’s mother’s illness calls her away from her teaching position at a one-room Colorado schoolhouse, the school board president is transparent in his pleasure at the prospect of closing the school. Fourteen-year-old Ida Bidson is not—closing the school will mean missing the exams that would qualify her to go on to high school, effectively dashing her hopes of becoming a teacher. But all is not lost: the students vote to continue secretly, with Ida as their teacher. While the plot is entirely predictable—the mean school board president finds them out and tries to shut the school down, only to be defeated in a climactic public meeting—the characters are well-developed and appealing. Ida is a diminutive spitfire who steers the family’s broken-down car while her little brother crouches on the floor to operate the gas and the clutch; her best friend Tom is a tinkerer whose home printing press saves the day; and even the most obstructive student in school is rendered sympathetically and with depth. Avi (Prairie School, p. 494, etc.) effectively conveys Ida’s difficulty in balancing her new role as teacher within her already busy life as student, family member (and therefore helper on the family’s sheep farm), and friend, and the details of one-room education are genuinely fascinating. This isn’t heavy stuff, but it gives a glimpse into a past where, although the form of education may have been very different from today’s, the problems facing the schools and students will be all too familiar to modern readers. (Fiction. 8-12)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-15-216375-1
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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