Thorough, nuanced, and well researched.
Drawing on primary and secondary source material, this well-researched collective biography delves into the Brontë siblings’ day-to-day lives in the parsonage of Haworth and explores their later achievements.
The six Brontë children—Maria, Elizabeth, Charlotte, Branwell, Emily, and Anne—weren’t permitted to play with the local children but found solace and companionship with each other, playing, writing, and taking long walks on the moors. The children’s educated and literary mother may have influenced their curate father, who came to support education for his daughters. But a disastrous foray in a harsh boarding school tragically led to the tuberculosis deaths of Maria, 11, and Elizabeth, 10, just a few years after the loss of their mother. Writing sustained the surviving siblings. Branwell and Charlotte, always close, continued to create their imaginary world, Angria; Anne and Emily had their own saga. Readers are shown how their insular yet creative childhoods set the tone for the sisters’ classics, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey. Browning also introduces novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, explaining how her 1870 biography of Charlotte has been the source of many misconceptions about the family. This work presents a nuanced story of an extremely close-knit family, both supportive of and sometimes at odds with each other, often happy, but just as often suffering from grief, anxiety, and depression. Occasional black-and-white illustrations add little to the work.
Thorough, nuanced, and well researched. (author’s note, who’s who, endnotes, bibliography, index) (Biography. 12-17)Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2023
ISBN: 9781538172315
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: Sept. 9, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
An important story drowned in illegibility and exposition.
A biography, in comic form, of a survivor of Josef Mengele’s horrific experiments on twins.
Eva and Miriam Mozes are twins, born in 1934 to the only Jewish family in their Romanian village. Though Papa, fearing the antisemitism of interwar Romania, wants the family to flee to safety in Palestine, Mama argues against it. And so it is that they are still in Romania when their home is invaded by Hitler’s ally, Hungary. Following an all-too-familiar story, the Mozes family is sent first to the ghetto and then on to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Torn away from their family, the girls are brought to Mengele for his nightmarish twin experiments. The graphic form mercifully makes it difficult to provide much detail of the stomach-churning tortures Mengele inflicted on those he found lesser, though the blocky illustrations certainly feature starvation, death, and disease. After the girls are liberated by the Soviets, they begin the second part of their ordeal: living with their trauma. Two extremely dense chapters detail the next 74 years, eventually building to the journey Eva would take late in her life toward liberating herself by forgiving the Nazis. This overstuffed survivor tale owes less to Maus than it does to the For Beginners series of graphic nonfiction. Dense blocks of historical play-by-play, ungainly prose, and hard-to-read lettering make this a slog.
An important story drowned in illegibility and exposition. (Graphic biography. 13-15)Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-68435-178-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Red Lightning Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
A remarkable, inspiring story of steadfast courage and irrepressible determination.
In this young reader’s adaptation of his memoir, Settle (with Rearden: Never Quit: From Alaskan Wilderness Rescues to Afghanistan Firefights as an Elite Special Ops PJ, 2017) recounts the extraordinarily challenging process of becoming a pararescue jumper.
From humble beginnings as the son of a single mother who was a recovering addict, Settle enrolled at the U.S. Naval Academy, where he was diagnosed with a heart condition. Although corrected by surgery, it ended his dream of becoming a Navy Seal, and rather than completing his education and pursuing another career path, he chose to drop out. Returning home to Alaska and working in a shoe store, Settle was inspired by a friend to become a PJ, spending a year conditioning himself to successfully complete the Alaska team’s Physical Ability and Stamina Test, the most difficult in the nation. Settle recounts in vivid detail his experiences in basic training at “Superman School” and its punishing physical demands. Additional specialized training in parachuting, survival skills, and diving, not to mention EMT training and paramedic school, prepared him for deployment to Afghanistan. There, he recovered from being shot in the head, going on to save the lives of others, with the final few chapters offering intense scenes of battlefield trauma. The rapid-fire pace and nonstop action will maintain the interest of those who appreciate military stories.
A remarkable, inspiring story of steadfast courage and irrepressible determination. (Nonfiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Oct. 30, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-13961-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
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