Both a quest story and a friendship story, this book brings to life the traumatic reality refugee children experience in a...
Sami and his grandfather escaped Afghanistan and traveled through Iran, Turkey, and Greece to make it to Boston, Massachusetts, where now they must learn to adapt to a new country, a foreign language, and a completely different culture.
In Boston, Sami and Baba try to make a living in music by playing the Afghani rebab, which Baba managed to keep safe during their journey. But one day while Sami is watching over the instrument while busking, someone steals it and disappears into a subway train. Sami has the month of Ramadan to recover the rebab. To do this he must find a way to earn $700 without Baba finding out, so he begins a sequence of trades. Along the way, Sami’s soccer team joins him in his struggle to get the rebab back. But flashbacks from his escape from war-torn Afghanistan keep coming back to haunt him; every time he crosses the Charles River he thinks of the journey across the Mediterranean, when water meant drowning and dehydration. Sami narrates in the present tense, his desperation to recover the rebab, his sorrow at leaving his home, and his acclimatization to Boston, English, and American customs made plain. It pulls readers into Sami’s quest to regain stability in his new life, making it impossible for readers not to empathize with his longing for a home.
Both a quest story and a friendship story, this book brings to life the traumatic reality refugee children experience in a world filled with borders and walls . (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-15576-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
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