A moving post–Civil War story of comradeship and self-discovery.
As Reconstruction begins, two 12-year-old girls join forces and head north to find their families.
Aurelia and Halle Lujah, each living on a different Virginia plantation, narrate this verse novel, set in 1865. Aurelia, who is white, reminisces about a privileged life of parties as she attempts to raise vegetables now that the people her family formerly enslaved have left. Halle, who is Black, renames herself now that she’s free and sets out in search of her parents. The girls’ paths cross, and a tragedy finds Halle tending to Aurelia, who wants to find her brother, a soldier who fought with the Union. Both realize it’s safer to travel together, and they don men’s clothes. Aurelia now goes by “Elly,” a nickname from her beloved brother. Together the girls cross a bloody battlefield and navigate using Halle’s knowledge of the North Star. They protect each other at great personal cost, and true friendship blossoms. Elly’s and Halle’s distinct voices and strong personalities balance each other nicely as each in turn gives and receives help. While the authors tread ground that will be familiar to readers of historical fiction—Elly teaching Halle to read—they also include thought-provoking moments as the characters contemplate death, wonder whether good acts can counteract past misdeeds, and encounter a formerly enslaved woman who has chosen to stay on her plantation despite knowing that she can leave.
A moving post–Civil War story of comradeship and self-discovery. (historical notes, publisher’s note) (Verse historical fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: July 23, 2024
ISBN: 9781638192152
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Milk & Cookies Press
Review Posted Online: April 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2024
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
This weave of perceptive, well-told tales wears its agenda with unusual grace.
Two young people of different generations get profound lessons in the tragic, enduring legacy of war.
Raised on the thrilling yarns of his great-grandpa Jacob and obsessed with both World War II and first-person–shooter video games, Trevor is eager to join the 93-year-old vet when he is invited to revisit the French town his unit had helped to liberate. In alternating chapters, the overseas trip retraces the parallel journeys of two young people—Trevor, 12, and Jacob, in 1944, just five years older—with similarly idealized visions of what war is like as they travel both then and now from Fort Benning to Omaha Beach and then through Normandy. Jacob’s wartime experiences are an absorbing whirl of hard fighting, sudden death, and courageous acts spurred by necessity…but the modern trip turns suspenseful too, as mysterious stalkers leave unsettling tokens and a series of hostile online posts that hint that Jacob doesn’t have just German blood on his hands. Korman acknowledges the widely held view of World War II as a just war but makes his own sympathies plain by repeatedly pointing to the unavoidable price of conflict: “Wars may have winning sides, but everybody loses.” Readers anticipating a heavy-handed moral will appreciate that Trevor arrives at a refreshingly realistic appreciation of video games’ pleasures and limitations. As his dad puts it: “War makes a better video game….But if you’re looking for a way to live, I’ll take peace every time.”
This weave of perceptive, well-told tales wears its agenda with unusual grace. (Fiction/historical fiction. 11-13)Pub Date: July 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-29020-2
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
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