A flat story of a girl challenging the limitations society puts on her.
In medieval England, Tick (short for Scholastica) has spent her childhood helping her chandler father make candles and wax charms to sell.
The annual Stourbridge Fair near Cambridge brings in the bulk of their year’s earnings. But when Papa takes on a boy as an apprentice, Tick finds herself pushed away, relegated to helping with the cooking, cleaning, and gardening. Tick resents this, feels rejected by her father, and decides she does not want to grow up or, as she puts it in the story’s first-person, present-tense narration, become “young-womanly.” The description “young-womanly” reappears many times as Tick grapples with gender expectations. She observes her friend Johanna no longer being hugged by her father since she became “rounder in her womanly places”; Tick wonders if the same thing will happen with her father, a concern that is conveyed in a way that might feel to readers uncomfortably close to sexualizing the father-daughter relationship. When Tick defies her father and makes her wax charms to sell at the fair without his knowledge, the frequency of her often repeated assertion that her father will be grateful and realize how indispensable she is undermines any tension that may have otherwise built up. The work includes some archaic phrases and words, and the olfactory challenges of the time period are vividly conveyed, but overall the worldbuilding feels thin, and the story fails to compel.
A flat story of a girl challenging the limitations society puts on her. (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: June 20, 2023
ISBN: 9781665912358
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious.
If you made a recording to be heard by the aliens who found the iPod, what would you record?
For 11-year-old Alex Petroski, it's easy. He records everything. He records the story of how he travels to New Mexico to a rocket festival with his dog, Carl Sagan, and his rocket. He records finding out that a man with the same name and birthday as his dead father has an address in Las Vegas. He records eating at Johnny Rockets for the first time with his new friends, who are giving him a ride to find his dead father (who might not be dead!), and losing Carl Sagan in the wilds of Las Vegas, and discovering he has a half sister. He even records his own awful accident. Cheng delivers a sweet, soulful debut novel with a brilliant, refreshing structure. His characters manage to come alive through the “transcript” of Alex’s iPod recording, an odd medium that sounds like it would be confusing but really works. Taking inspiration from the Voyager Golden Record released to space in 1977, Alex, who explains he has “light brown skin,” records all the important moments of a journey that takes him from a family of two to a family of plenty.
Riveting, inspiring, and sometimes hilarious. (Fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-18637-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
A captivating book situated in present-day discourse around the refugee crisis, featuring two boys who stand by their high...
Two parallel stories, one of a Syrian boy from Aleppo fleeing war, and another of a white American boy, son of a NATO contractor, dealing with the challenges of growing up, intersect at a house in Brussels.
Ahmed lost his father while crossing the Mediterranean. Alone and broke in Europe, he takes things into his own hands to get to safety but ends up having to hide in the basement of a residential house. After months of hiding, he is discovered by Max, a boy of similar age and parallel high integrity and courage, who is experiencing his own set of troubles learning a new language, moving to a new country, and being teased at school. In an unexpected turn of events, the two boys and their new friends Farah, a Muslim Belgian girl, and Oscar, a white Belgian boy, successfully scheme for Ahmed to go to school while he remains in hiding the rest of the time. What is at stake for Ahmed is immense, and so is the risk to everyone involved. Marsh invites art and history to motivate her protagonists, drawing parallels to gentiles who protected Jews fleeing Nazi terror and citing present-day political news. This well-crafted and suspenseful novel touches on the topics of refugees and immigrant integration, terrorism, Islam, Islamophobia, and the Syrian war with sensitivity and grace.
A captivating book situated in present-day discourse around the refugee crisis, featuring two boys who stand by their high values in the face of grave risk and succeed in drawing goodwill from others. (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: Aug. 7, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-30757-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Roaring Brook Press
Review Posted Online: June 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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