An adventure-filled glimpse into history through the eyes of a determined daughter.
A Chinese girl disguises herself as a boy to work on the perilous construction of the transcontinental railroad.
It is 1867, and 15-year-old Tam Ling Fan just lost her twin brother, Jing Fan, to an influenza outbreak. Her magistrate father was also recently falsely accused of treason and imprisoned, and her family expects Ling Fan to follow her duties as a young woman. Through an advantageous marriage, the Tams could become allied with a powerful family who might wield their influence to assist Baba. Ling Fan sees another path, however. Disguised as Jing Fan, she boards a ship to California with a prized railroad contract in hand. But railroad work is a dangerous affair—and she might have underestimated how long it would take to collect enough money for a bribe to help free Baba. Yee takes readers on a vivid journey through the pressures testing those joining the race to build the first transcontinental railroad—from physical dangers and mental stress to the lure of vices. Racial tensions and xenophobia are ever present as well. At home in China as well as among her fellow workers, Ling Fan navigates the dynamics of her class privilege and her gender. A degree of impulsivity and naïve trust in others sometimes jeopardizes her already precarious situation, but luck keeps her from harm, and her persistence and perseverance, though tested, are unyielding.
An adventure-filled glimpse into history through the eyes of a determined daughter. (author’s note, discussion questions) (Historical fiction. 11-16)Pub Date: April 5, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72841-582-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Carolrhoda Lab
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2022
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American...
Crystal-clear prose poems paint a heart-rending picture of 13-year-old Mina Masako Tagawa’s journey from Seattle to a Japanese-American internment camp during World War II.
This vividly wrought story of displacement, told from Mina’s first-person perspective, begins as it did for so many Japanese-Americans: with the bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. The backlash of her Seattle community is instantaneous (“Jap, Jap, Jap, the word bounces / around the walls of the hall”), and Mina chronicles its effects on her family with a heavy heart. “I am an American, I scream / in my head, but my mouth is stuffed / with rocks; my body is a stone, like the statue / of a little Buddha Grandpa prays to.” When Roosevelt decrees that West Coast Japanese-Americans are to be imprisoned in inland camps, the Tagawas board up their house, leaving the cat, Grandpa’s roses and Mina’s best friend behind. Following the Tagawas from Washington’s Puyallup Assembly Center to Idaho’s Minidoka Relocation Center (near the titular town of Eden), the narrative continues in poems and letters. In them, injustices such as endless camp lines sit alongside even larger ones, such as the government’s asking interned young men, including Mina’s brother, to fight for America.
An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American internment. (historical note) (Verse/historical fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: March 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-8075-1739-0
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Whitman
Review Posted Online: Jan. 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
Heartbreaking, historical, and a little bit hopeful.
January 1945: as Russians advance through East Prussia, four teens’ lives converge in hopes of escape.
Returning to the successful formula of her highly lauded debut, Between Shades of Gray (2011), Sepetys combines research (described in extensive backmatter) with well-crafted fiction to bring to life another little-known story: the sinking (from Soviet torpedoes) of the German ship Wilhelm Gustloff. Told in four alternating voices—Lithuanian nurse Joana, Polish Emilia, Prussian forger Florian, and German soldier Alfred—with often contemporary cadences, this stints on neither history nor fiction. The three sympathetic refugees and their motley companions (especially an orphaned boy and an elderly shoemaker) make it clear that while the Gustloff was a German ship full of German civilians and soldiers during World War II, its sinking was still a tragedy. Only Alfred, stationed on the Gustloff, lacks sympathy; almost a caricature, he is self-delusional, unlikable, a Hitler worshiper. As a vehicle for exposition, however, and a reminder of Germany’s role in the war, he serves an invaluable purpose that almost makes up for the mustache-twirling quality of his petty villainy. The inevitability of the ending (including the loss of several characters) doesn’t change its poignancy, and the short chapters and slowly revealed back stories for each character guarantee the pages keep turning.
Heartbreaking, historical, and a little bit hopeful. (author’s note, research and sources, maps) (Historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-16030-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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