Cleanly written and nicely detailed Christmas story, not wholesale sentimentality, by true-crime writer Bledsoe (Before He Wakes, 1994, etc.). Back in the '50s in Thomasville, North Carolina, ``Whitey'' Black and the narrator (nameless), both newsboys and fourth- graders, become friends when they go halves on a paper route. Neither boy is well off. Whitey lives on welfare with his cigarette-smoking mother and polio-crippled four-year-old sister, Sandy. One Thanksgiving a charity group gives the Blacks a bag of groceries, shaming Whitey before his friend. As time passes, though, Whitey at last allows the narrator into his house, where he meets Sandy. Sandy's one source of solace seems to come from the story The Littlest Angel, which Whitey repeatedly reads to her. Come Christmas, Whitey decides to buy his sister a much longed for angel doll. But no such item is in the stores. When the two lads see a big doll that someone might be able to dress as an angel, Whitey devotes his savings to buying the nine-dollar toy and hiring a seamstress. But then Sandy is hospitalized and dies before she can receive the angel. Though the narrator never sees Whitey again, he discovers, as an adult, that his old friend has been giving out dolls to a children's hospital every Christmas. Bledsoe says his story was inspired by ``my memory of the first person I'd know to die.'' But the tale, while sometimes affecting, has little impact, perhaps mainly because Sandy lacks weight on the page. There's an idyllic moment when the boys go out with the narrator's father to gather two Christmas trees and mistletoe from the woods, and indeed, this short novel's best quality has less to do with the plot than with descriptions evoking local stores and streets at Christmas. May well move young, unsophisticated readers. (Literary Guild alternate selection)
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1997
ISBN: 0-312-17104-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1997
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes...
In a riveting novel from Myers (At Her Majesty’s Request, 1999, etc.), a teenager who dreams of being a filmmaker writes the story of his trial for felony murder in the form of a movie script, with journal entries after each day’s action.
Steve is accused of being an accomplice in the robbery and murder of a drug store owner. As he goes through his trial, returning each night to a prison where most nights he can hear other inmates being beaten and raped, he reviews the events leading to this point in his life. Although Steve is eventually acquitted, Myers leaves it up to readers to decide for themselves on his protagonist’s guilt or innocence.
The format of this taut and moving drama forcefully regulates the pacing; breathless, edge-of-the-seat courtroom scenes written entirely in dialogue alternate with thoughtful, introspective journal entries that offer a sense of Steve’s terror and confusion, and that deftly demonstrate Myers’s point: the road from innocence to trouble is comprised of small, almost invisible steps, each involving an experience in which a “positive moral decision” was not made. (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: May 31, 1999
ISBN: 0-06-028077-8
Page Count: 280
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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