A lightweight, unevenly written historical tale for children.
In this fictional diary aimed at young readers, a young slave girl recounts a dramatic year in her life.
In 1717, Ruby Jo, who’s around 12 years old, is a slave at the Jasmine Manor Plantation near Charles Town, South Carolina. She works in the “Big House” looking after Missy Linda Sue, the younger of the plantation owners’ two daughters. At night, Ruby and other slaves illegally learn reading, writing, and simple arithmetic in a “Pit School”—a secret clearing in the forest—taught by “Mars Chester.” (“Mars” is patois for “Master,” so Chester must be a white man, but his role at Jasmine Manor isn’t explained.) Mars Chester gives Ruby Jo her own diary, which begins after harvest time with a story of an exciting barge trip to Charles Town; there, the travelers—Miss Kate, her daughters, and Ruby Jo—see the pirate Blackbeard and his men. Ruby Jo records illnesses, deaths, feasts, and work; her growing crush on Taleteller Frank, a boy her own age; and unsettling news about runaways and a possible spy among the slaves. As the book ends, Letitia Belle’s wedding day in Charles Town is ruined when Blackbeard and his pirate ships blockade the harbor. Slave narratives are often catalogs of horrors, but McWilliams’ (Diary of a Black Seminole Girl, Ebony Noel, 2016, etc.) series installment emphasizes the protagonist’s adolescent emotions and sense of fun. Some people will feel that the author’s take sugarcoats the reality of slave life; others will appreciate how it celebrates the slaves’ creativity. The style is breathless and lively, full of capitalizations and exclamation points, giving readers a sense of Ruby Jo’s dialect while not overdoing it. However, a few anachronisms and inconsistencies mar the story; for example, the slaves sing “Silent Night,” composed in 1818, and “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” composed in 1868. Also, Ruby Jo can spell the difficult word “caterwauling” but writes “through” as “thru.” And although a revelation of literacy can mean death for a slave, Ruby Jo allows her mistresses to see her “Kin Quilt,” which features family names written in stitches.
A lightweight, unevenly written historical tale for children.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2001
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Time Tunnel Media
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z(2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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