It seems unfair to 11-year-old Georgie Mason that in Indiana’s summer heat she can’t go swimming or even to the movies for fear of catching polio. It is “simply and horribly unbelievable,” however, that her teenage neighbor Phyllis is living in an iron lung, viewing the world through mirrors like Tennyson’s tower-bound Lady of Shalott. Georgie’s struggle with the cosmic implications of her neighbor’s plight—and her rising fear that Phyllis might be seducing her brother Emmett into helping her die—form the core of this gut-punching, often very funny novel that asks serious questions about our corporeal selves, faith, power, alienation, euthanasia and, it being 1952, the relative importance of saddle shoes. Lasky creates an unusually credible, likable 11-year-old voice and expertly maps Georgie’s emotional terrain, a rich landscape shaped by literature and peppered with sound bites such as “I was very malaised” and “I like reasons for stuff.” A truly extraordinary page-turner that embraces life’s big and small aspects with humor and a healthy respect for its profound contradictions. (Historical fiction. 11 & up)
Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7636-3982-2
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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
Moose’s world is turned upside down when his family moves to Alcatraz Island where his Dad has taken a job as a prison guard. Super-responsible Moose, big for 12, finds himself caught in the social interactions of this odd cut-off world. He cares for his sister who is older, yet acts much younger due to her autism and he finds his life alternating between frustration and growth. His mother focuses all of her attention on ways to cure the sister; his dad works two jobs and meekly accepts the mother’s choices; his fellow island-dwellers are a funny mix of oddball characters and good friends. Basing her story on the actual experience of those who supported the prison in the ’30s—when Al Capone was an inmate—Choldenko’s pacing is exquisite, balancing the tense family dynamics alongside the often-humorous and riveting school story of peer pressure and friendship. Fascinating setting as a metaphor for Moose’s own imprisonment and enabling some hysterically funny scenes, but a great read no matter where it takes place. (lengthy author’s note with footnotes to sources) (Fiction. 11-14)
Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-399-23861-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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