Expressive but incomplete; share it with other Holocaust books or lots of caregiver context.
Women in Auschwitz secretly make a birthday gift.
This historical piece uses a frame story with a temporal double-remove: a first-person narrator looks back to the time “When I was young” and learned about her mother’s Holocaust experience. Narrator Sorale is a blank; her mother, Fania, is the real protagonist, turning 20 in the Nazi camp. Fania’s friends, despite the danger, craft her “a tiny book shaped like a heart, no bigger than a butterfly,” filled with handwritten messages. Sorale and Fania (white and Jewish) have awkwardly frozen faces and stiff hands in the frame story’s illustrations, but Rudnicki shows Auschwitz’s oppressiveness hauntingly in tertiary blues and pale, rusty orange-beiges. His rows of prisoners in stripes, with similar faces and skin creepily matching the backgrounds, powerfully evoke dehumanization and even imply disappearance. However, readers unfamiliar with the Holocaust won’t get all of that. They’ll absorb the fear, crowding, hunger, and cold of Auschwitz, but the “great darkness” that stole Fania’s family remains enigmatic—gassing and mass extermination are unmentioned. Death looms explicitly but not the scope or means—the threat sounds individual. Fania’s friends’ fates are unaddressed. An author’s note adds some historical detail and photographs of the actual book, which lives at the Montreal Holocaust Museum.
Expressive but incomplete; share it with other Holocaust books or lots of caregiver context. (author’s note) (Picture book. 8-11)Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77260-057-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Second Story Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Ironically, by choosing such a dramatic catalyst, the author weakens the adventure’s impact overall and leaves readers to...
A group of talking farm animals catches wind of the farm owner’s intention to burn the barn (with them in it) for insurance money and hatches a plan to flee.
Bond begins briskly—within the first 10 pages, barn cat Burdock has overheard Dewey Baxter’s nefarious plan, and by Page 17, all of the farm animals have been introduced and Burdock is sharing the terrifying news. Grady, Dewey’s (ever-so-slightly) more principled brother, refuses to go along, but instead of standing his ground, he simply disappears. This leaves the animals to fend for themselves. They do so by relying on their individual strengths and one another. Their talents and personalities match their species, bringing an element of realism to balance the fantasy elements. However, nothing can truly compensate for the bland horror of the premise. Not the growing sense of family among the animals, the serendipitous intervention of an unknown inhabitant of the barn, nor the convenient discovery of an alternate home. Meanwhile, Bond’s black-and-white drawings, justly compared to those of Garth Williams, amplify the sense of dissonance. Charming vignettes and single- and double-page illustrations create a pastoral world into which the threat of large-scale violence comes as a shock.
Ironically, by choosing such a dramatic catalyst, the author weakens the adventure’s impact overall and leaves readers to ponder the awkward coincidences that propel the plot. (Animal fantasy. 8-10)Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-544-33217-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: HMH Books
Review Posted Online: March 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2015
Medically, both squicky and hopeful; emotionally, unbelievably squeaky-clean.
A 12-year-old copes with a brain tumor.
Maddie likes potatoes and fake mustaches. Kids at school are nice (except one whom readers will see instantly is a bully); soon they’ll get to perform Shakespeare scenes in a unit they’ve all been looking forward to. But recent dysfunctions in Maddie’s arm and leg mean, stunningly, that she has a brain tumor. She has two surgeries, the first successful, the second taking place after the book’s end, leaving readers hanging. The tumor’s not malignant, but it—or the surgeries—could cause sight loss, personality change, or death. The descriptions of surgery aren’t for the faint of heart. The authors—parents of a real-life Maddie who really had a brain tumor—imbue fictional Maddie’s first-person narration with quirky turns of phrase (“For the love of potatoes!”) and whimsy (she imagines her medical battles as epic fantasy fights and pretends MRI stands for Mustard Rat from Indiana or Mustaches Rock Importantly), but they also portray her as a model sick kid. She’s frightened but never acts out, snaps, or resists. Her most frequent commentary about the tumor, having her skull opened, and the possibility of death is “Boo” or “Super boo.” She even shoulders the bully’s redemption. Maddie and most characters are white; one cringe-inducing hallucinatory surgery dream involves “chanting island natives” and a “witch doctor lady.”
Medically, both squicky and hopeful; emotionally, unbelievably squeaky-clean. (authors’ note, discussion questions) (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Oct. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-62972-330-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Shadow Mountain
Review Posted Online: Aug. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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