An abandoned suitcase pushes a Wisconsin farm girl with a yen for travel out of the nest in this bland post_Civil War story from LaFaye (The Year of the Sawdust Man, p. 740). While waiting in a Michigan train station for relatives who never show, Katherine, 16, finds a suitcase belonging to one Edith Shay of Richmond, Virginia, and impulsively buys a one-way ticket to Chicago, intending to see some of the world while returning the bag to its owner. The world she encounters is mostly benign. She has little trouble finding work, lodging, or role models, is never in personal danger, and experiences or witnesses little suffering beyond a robbery (while she sleeps), hard work, and family squabbles. In fact, during her winter-long journey from Chicago to Richmond, with stops in Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., she spends far more time battling homesickness and fretting about her deception (she travels as "Edith") than describing sights or stretching her wings. While readers will relish Katherine's/Edith's colorful way with a phrase, they will have trouble reconciling her independence of spirit with her meek responses to the verbal abuse of her employers, and the ending is weak_the real Edith is dead, with no kin. Katherine walks away, thinking about taking up a career as a travel writer. With so many other fledglings, from Katherine Paterson's Lyddie (1991) to the young artist in Joann Mazzio's Leaving Eldorado (1993), facing first flights over far harsher terrain, this junket seems too easy. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-87598-8
Page Count: 198
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From England’s Children’s Laureate, a searing WWI-era tale of a close extended family repeatedly struck by adversity and injustice. On vigil in the trenches, 17-year-old Thomas Peaceful looks back at a childhood marked by guilt over his father’s death, anger at the shabby treatment his strong-minded mother receives from the local squire and others—and deep devotion to her, to his brain-damaged brother Big Joe, and especially to his other older brother Charlie, whom he has followed into the army by lying about his age. Weaving telling incidents together, Morpurgo surrounds the Peacefuls with mean-spirited people at home, and devastating wartime experiences on the front, ultimately setting readers up for a final travesty following Charlie’s refusal of an order to abandon his badly wounded brother. Themes and small-town class issues here may find some resonance on this side of the pond, but the particular cultural and historical context will distance the story from American readers—particularly as the pace is deliberate, and the author’s hints about where it’s all heading are too rare and subtle to create much suspense. (Fiction. 11-13, adult)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-439-63648-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
Miah’s melodramatic death overshadows a tale as rich in social and personal insight as any of Woodson’s previous books.
In a meditative interracial love story with a wrenching climactic twist, Woodson (The House You Pass on the Way, 1997, etc.) offers an appealing pair of teenagers and plenty of intellectual grist, before ending her story with a senseless act of violence.
Jeremiah and Elisha bond from the moment they collide in the hall of their Manhattan prep school: He’s the only child of celebrity parents; she’s the youngest by ten years in a large family. Not only sharply sensitive to the reactions of those around them, Ellie and Miah also discover depths and complexities in their own intense feelings that connect clearly to their experiences, their social environment, and their own characters. In quiet conversations and encounters, Woodson perceptively explores varieties of love, trust, and friendship, as she develops well-articulated histories for both families. Suddenly Miah, forgetting his father’s warning never to be seen running in a white neighborhood, exuberantly dashes into a park and is shot down by police. The parting thought that, willy-nilly, time moves on will be a colder comfort for stunned readers than it evidently is for Ellie.
Miah’s melodramatic death overshadows a tale as rich in social and personal insight as any of Woodson’s previous books. (Fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-399-23112-9
Page Count: 181
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1998
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