This historical novel, winner of the 2000 Whitbread Award, deals with one of the more lurid and fascinating bits of English history. In 18th-century England, a man makes his living disposing of the unwanted children of both rich and poor women. Sometimes he sells them into slavery, sometimes he kills them, and sometimes he blackmails the mothers for years thereafter. He even abuses his own son Meshak, a simpleminded lad. Meshak, who is quite literally haunted by the babies he has helped to bury in ditches throughout the countryside, rescues one special abandoned child: the illegitimate newborn of a young woman whom he has worshipped from afar. He takes the baby to the Coram Hospital, where he is named Aaron, raised as an orphan, and exhibits a prodigious talent for music, encouraged by none other than George Frideric Handel. Years later, the paths of all the participants of the drama—Meshak, his villainous father, the illegitimate child, the child’s parents—intersect with electrifying consequences. For when the participants in the original tragedy gather together, “there was not just one truth, because there was not one person there who knew the whole of it.” This of course lends the plot structure considerable tension as the readers watch the characters try to unravel things. In her Preface, the author gives historical background regarding the infanticide and child slavery of the era, and the real historical character, Captain Thomas Coram, who devoted much of his life to establishing the Foundling Hospital where abandoned children would be sheltered. The historical setting is presented in enough detail to set the stage but not overwhelm readers with no previous background and knowledge. This is the stuff of high melodrama, and readers of the genre who will be swept along by the theatrics will not be disappointed. (Fiction. 11-16)
Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-31544-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2001
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
A wartime drama with enough depth and psychological complexity to satisfy budding bookworms.
Three plucky orphan siblings are in search of a mother in wartime England.
When their grandmother dies, 12-year-old William, 11-year-old Edmund, and 9-year-old Anna are left in London in the care of an elderly housekeeper. As part of the World War II evacuation of children to safety, they are relocated to the countryside, something the family solicitor hopes may lead to finding adoptive parents. However, they are billeted with the Forresters, an unpleasant family reminiscent of the Dursleys. Bullying by their hosts’ two sons, who despise them; the ever present fear of German attack; and the dread of homelessness test their mettle to the limit. The orphans long to find a home of their own, and good boy William is stressed by his responsibility as head of the small family. Edmund’s desire for revenge against the Forresters and a prank involving a snake get them evicted from their billet, and they end up in a much worse situation. They find sanctuary in the village library and a savior in the librarian, who is married to a German and therefore ostracized by the locals. Mrs. Müller provides them with moral support, a listening ear, and true appreciation and love. The classic books she chooses for them—The Wind in the Willows and Anne of Green Gables, among others—may generate ideas for further reading. All characters are White.
A wartime drama with enough depth and psychological complexity to satisfy budding bookworms. (reading list) (Historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4705-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Margaret Ferguson/Holiday House
Review Posted Online: Nov. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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