Lily Tregenza’s diary entries provide an engaging glimpse of the changes wrought upon her family farm and small village on the Devon coast during the months leading up to D-Day. Her father is off repairing engines in the African desert, her new classmate Barry is an evacuee from London, the village is full of Yankee soldiers and her cat, Tips, keeps disappearing. Most dramatically, the villages and farms are evacuated as the Allies take over the beaches to practice in preparation for landing in France. Morpurgo’s voice for 12-year-old Lily is clear and believable. A framing story for Lily’s journal—that she, in her 60s, sent the pages about these months in 1943 and 1944 to her 12-year-old grandson—gives a sweet closing to Lily’s account of her friendship with two kind American soldiers. Readers drawn to the wonderful green eyes of the cat on the cover may find their disappointment that this isn’t really a cat story assuaged by the considerable charm of Lily’s narrative. (Fiction. 8-11)
Pub Date: April 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-439-79661-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
Despite its lackluster execution, this story’s simple premise and basic vocabulary make it suitable for younger readers...
From the author of the Animorphs series comes this earnest novel in verse about an orphaned Sudanese war refugee with a passion for cows, who has resettled in Minnesota with relatives.
Arriving in winter, Kek spots a cow that reminds him of his father’s herd, a familiar sight in an alien world. Later he returns with Hannah, a friendly foster child, and talks the cow’s owner into hiring him to look after it. When the owner plans to sell the cow, Kek becomes despondent. Full of wide-eyed amazement and unalloyed enthusiasm for all things American, Kek is a generic—bordering on insulting—stereotype. His tribe, culture and language are never identified; personal details, such as appearance and age, are vague or omitted. Lacking the quirks and foibles that bring characters to life, Kek seems more a composite of traits designed to instruct readers than an engaging individual in his own right.
Despite its lackluster execution, this story’s simple premise and basic vocabulary make it suitable for younger readers interested in the plight of war refugees. (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-312-36765-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2007
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
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