A compelling mystery unevenly executed.
An orphan with visons seeks her past in a Gothic 1964 Quebec.
Sixteen-year-old Tess (for Thérèse) has always wanted to travel, but that doesn't mean she wants to be forced from her home. When the Benevolent Home for Necessitous Girls in Ontario burns down, she's turfed out with a bare-bones clue ("Each of you seven older girls has something from your past," explains the matron, linking this novel to the other six books in the Secrets series). Armed with a disconnected phone number and an address in rural Quebec, Tess braves the train, bothered only by the ghosts she's seen all her life. The address holds no easy answers to either her past or her visions; it's merely a photogenic abandoned mansion, filled with crumbling psychiatry books and long since ravaged by locals. Her investigation of the ruin is interrupted by a hostile squatter, who threatens her with violence. Jackson disbelieves Tess' tale though he refuses to explain his own secrets as a broke, filthy teenager who's exceedingly well-spoken in both French and English—often to the point of irritating pedantry. Tess' visions and their findings in the creepy basement lead her to suspect pulp-novel medical shenanigans, which themselves devolve into a frankly absurd deus ex machina conclusion. Unlike the cackling villainy of the back story, the realistic landscape of racist microagressions that plague Métis Jackson is heartbreakingly matter-of-fact.
A compelling mystery unevenly executed. (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4598-0654-2
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Orca
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Evocations of Narnia are not enough to salvage this fantasy, which struggles with thin character development.
A portal fantasy survivor story from an established devotional writer.
Fourteen-year-old Eva’s maternal grandmother lives on a grand estate in England; Eva and her academic parents live in New Haven, Connecticut. When she and Mum finally visit Carrick Hall, Eva is alternately resentful at what she’s missed and overjoyed to connect with sometimes aloof Grandmother. Alongside questions of Eva’s family history, the summer is permeated by a greater mystery surrounding the work of fictional children’s fantasy writer A.H.W. Clifton, who wrote a Narnialike series that Eva adores. As it happens, Grandmother was one of several children who entered and ruled Ternival, the world of Clifton’s books; the others perished in 1952, and Grandmother hasn’t recovered. The Narnia influences are strong—Eva’s grandmother is the Susan figure who’s repudiated both magic and God—and the ensuing trauma has created rifts that echo through her relationships with her daughter and granddaughter. An early narrative implication that Eva will visit Ternival to set things right barely materializes in this series opener; meanwhile, the religious parable overwhelms the magic elements as the story winds on. The serviceable plot is weakened by shallow characterization. Little backstory appears other than that which immediately concerns the plot, and Eva tends to respond emotionally as the story requires—resentful when her seething silence is required, immediately trusting toward characters readers need to trust. Major characters are cued white.
Evocations of Narnia are not enough to salvage this fantasy, which struggles with thin character development. (author’s note, map, author Q&A) (Religious fantasy. 12-14)Pub Date: Jan. 30, 2024
ISBN: 9780593194454
Page Count: 384
Publisher: WaterBrook
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2023
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