A mediocre high school chess player discovers his perfectly ordinary father is a former grandmaster in this standard-issue father-son relationship story.
Daniel Pratzer has always been a jack-of-all-trades, master of none when it comes to athletics. “I had worked hard to become a decent baseball player…an acceptable soccer player…but I had never been great at any of them.” When he takes up chess as a way to make friends at his New Jersey private school, he is informed by his teammates that his accountant father, Morris W. Pratzer, used to be an internationally known chess champion. They urge Daniel to convince Morris to take part in a high-stakes New York City tournament along with them and their fathers. Stung by the fact that Morris never revealed his “checkered” past, Daniel angrily confronts him only to learn that his dad quit the game because the competition had released his incendiary temper and nearly cost him his life. But Morris decides to play the tournament anyway, and his famous rage re-emerges when he faces an old rival. In the predictable end, father and son learn valuable lessons about teamwork, honor and acceptance. Check. Checkmate. The paint-by-numbers plot and unimaginative dialogue are unlikely to encourage anyone but the most die-hard chess aficionado to finish this rote problem novel. (Fiction. 11-15)
Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-32771-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus & Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2013
A somewhat entertaining, fast-paced journey that fizzles at the end.
A teenager runs away to Seattle, hoping to locate her missing sister.
Fifteen-year-old Eleanor idolizes her older sister, Sam, despite their being complete opposites: Sam is outgoing and wild, while socially awkward Eleanor is known as Little Miss Perfect, always doing the right and safe thing. After Sam runs away from home, the only communication she has with Eleanor are three postcards sent from Seattle. Eleanor decides to trace her 18-year-old sister’s footsteps, leaving her messages and hopping on a bus to find her. But when Sam doesn’t meet her at the bus depot, Eleanor, who has no real plan, has to learn how to survive on her own while searching the city for her sister. While the close bond between the girls is well depicted through flashbacks, the reveal of an important secret ultimately feels anticlimactic. A major plot point relies too heavily on chance and coincidence to be fully believable. While the color scheme, cityscapes, and background illustrations are atmospheric, the manga-inspired drawing style comes across as dated and flat. The depiction of the fabricated stories Eleanor tells is intriguing, as are the themes of friendship, living in the moment, and maintaining hope; unfortunately, none are thematically strong enough to resonate. The emotional impact of Eleanor’s experiences is diluted by her at times humorous narration. Eleanor and the main cast read as White.
A somewhat entertaining, fast-paced journey that fizzles at the end. (Graphic novel. 12-15)Pub Date: April 26, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-316-50023-4
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2022
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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