LOST BOYS

Name: LOST BOYS
Author: Darcey Rosenblatt
ISBN: 978-1-62779-758-0

by Darcey Rosenblatt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 22, 2017

Reza’s story is compelling, but the simplistic depiction of secondary characters as good Muslims and bad Muslims turns a...

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In Rosenblatt’s ambitious debut novel, Reza, a 12-year-old Iranian boy, clings to friendship and his love of music as the Iran-Iraq War tears his world apart.

Reza’s father has died in the war, and Reza’s mother, who follows the Great Leader without thinking, would be proud if he suffered the same fate. At school, a mullah comes to recruit boys, enticing them with the promise of riches and beautiful women in the afterlife if they die in the war. When tragedy strikes his family again, taking the life of his only supportive relative, Reza decides to follow his best friend and enlist. After a horrifying battle scene, Reza ends up in a prisoner-of-war camp, where he befriends boys who have abandoned faith in the war and in Islam, as he has, and clashes with the judgmental bully who remains pro-revolution and continues practicing Islam. The characterization of Muslims tends to conflate religious faith with violence, sympathetic characters rejecting both while most evil characters embrace both. The notable exception to this rule dies early in the story; although Reza returns to Islam toward the end, it is too late to counteract this simplistic tendency. The Irish foreign-aid worker who teaches at the camp is the most well-developed secondary character, perhaps not surprising, since the author’s main source consists of an aid worker’s accounts. Absent from the source notes are written accounts by Iranians who lived through the war, which may have helped breathe life into the Iranian characters as well.

Reza’s story is compelling, but the simplistic depiction of secondary characters as good Muslims and bad Muslims turns a complicated historical subject into a setting that reinforces stereotypes many Westerners hold. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 11-14)

Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2017

ISBN: 978-1-62779-758-0

Page Count: 288

Publisher: Henry Holt

Review Posted Online: May 9, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017

Categories:

CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION

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DUST OF EDEN

by Mariko Nagai ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 2014

An engaging novel-in-poems that imagines one earnest, impassioned teenage girl’s experience of the Japanese-American...

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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

Categories:

CHILDREN'S FAMILY | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION

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WAR STORIES

by Gordon Korman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 21, 2020

This weave of perceptive, well-told tales wears its agenda with unusual grace.

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Two young people of different generations get profound lessons in the tragic, enduring legacy of war.

Raised on the thrilling yarns of his great-grandpa Jacob and obsessed with both World War II and first-person–shooter video games, Trevor is eager to join the 93-year-old vet when he is invited to revisit the French town his unit had helped to liberate. In alternating chapters, the overseas trip retraces the parallel journeys of two young people—Trevor, 12, and Jacob, in 1944, just five years older—with similarly idealized visions of what war is like as they travel both then and now from Fort Benning to Omaha Beach and then through Normandy. Jacob’s wartime experiences are an absorbing whirl of hard fighting, sudden death, and courageous acts spurred by necessity…but the modern trip turns suspenseful too, as mysterious stalkers leave unsettling tokens and a series of hostile online posts that hint that Jacob doesn’t have just German blood on his hands. Korman acknowledges the widely held view of World War II as a just war but makes his own sympathies plain by repeatedly pointing to the unavoidable price of conflict: “Wars may have winning sides, but everybody loses.” Readers anticipating a heavy-handed moral will appreciate that Trevor arrives at a refreshingly realistic appreciation of video games’ pleasures and limitations. As his dad puts it: “War makes a better video game….But if you’re looking for a way to live, I’ll take peace every time.”

This weave of perceptive, well-told tales wears its agenda with unusual grace. (Fiction/historical fiction. 11-13)