Experienced readers will enjoy piecing together clues and weighing evidence in this historical adventure story.
Soviet twins use diaries to recount their experiences during the Siege of Leningrad.
When Germany invades the Soviet Union in 1941, the city soviet council arranges for young people, including Viktor and Nadya, 12-year-old White twins, to flee Leningrad on trains reserved just for children. Before their departure, their father gives the siblings notebooks in which to record what’s unfolding. When the twins become separated and sent on different trains, this tension sets the story in motion. While Nadya’s train breaks down, Viktor ends up on a collective farm. And as Nadya and her companions continue on foot, eventually joining Soviet sailors in a fortress; Viktor, braving a labor camp and other obstacles, sets out to reunite with Nadya. While they describe their nonstop survival against hunger, cold, enemy forces, and death at every turn, interspersed archival photos, maps, propaganda posters, and fictionalized artifacts make the story resemble a documentary novel. Reports from a Col. Smirnov in 1946 frame the children’s documents, presented as having been reassembled into chronologically arranged accounts. Blue ink delineates Nadya’s narration and red, Viktor’s. It’s up to Smirnov to decide their guilt or innocence regarding charges brought in relation to the events recounted within. An added layer of mystery concerning a Soviet agent helps bring to a close this complex, lengthy story translated from Italian.
Experienced readers will enjoy piecing together clues and weighing evidence in this historical adventure story. (author's note, image credits) (Thriller. 11-14)Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984893-32-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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