An arresting collection of deep, accessible stories of people on the move.
This book gracefully brings to life stories of escape from many places across the globe.
Chan Hak-chi and Li Kit-hing, a couple, tie themselves to each other with a rope and swim for six hours across a shark-ridden bay to reach Hong Kong and escape famine and systemic state persecution in mainland China. Joachim Neumann and his friends dig a tunnel under the Berlin Wall in the 1960s and facilitate the escape of 57 people to West Germany, including Joachim’s girlfriend. Harriet Tubman, once enslaved herself, risks torture and death to help an estimated 70 others escape slavery. Other stories recount escapes related to climate change in Kiribati, violence and poverty in Mexico, war in Syria, and more. Each spread features one case with real-life, named heroes either from the recent past or who are craftily connected to our present time. For example, the son of Russom Keflezighi, who walked the equivalent of 10 marathons away from danger in his Eritrean homeland, won both the New York and Boston marathons in the U.S. Many featured refugees and immigrants settle in the U.S. as their final destination, making the book particularly accessible to American audiences. Adorned with mostly abstract illustrations of people walking, swimming, biking, and even flying while fleeing danger, the book poignantly ends with two short articles from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on rights and freedoms related to movement.
An arresting collection of deep, accessible stories of people on the move. (Informational picture book. 9-14)Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-911373-81-0
Page Count: 40
Publisher: Lantana
Review Posted Online: March 16, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2021
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic.
Chainani works an elaborate sea change akin to Gregory Maguire’s Wicked (1995), though he leaves the waters muddied.
Every four years, two children, one regarded as particularly nice and the other particularly nasty, are snatched from the village of Gavaldon by the shadowy School Master to attend the divided titular school. Those who survive to graduate become major or minor characters in fairy tales. When it happens to sweet, Disney princess–like Sophie and her friend Agatha, plain of features, sour of disposition and low of self-esteem, they are both horrified to discover that they’ve been dropped not where they expect but at Evil and at Good respectively. Gradually—too gradually, as the author strings out hundreds of pages of Hogwarts-style pranks, classroom mishaps and competitions both academic and romantic—it becomes clear that the placement wasn’t a mistake at all. Growing into their true natures amid revelations and marked physical changes, the two spark escalating rivalry between the wings of the school. This leads up to a vicious climactic fight that sees Good and Evil repeatedly switching sides. At this point, readers are likely to feel suddenly left behind, as, thanks to summary deus ex machina resolutions, everything turns out swell(ish).
Rich and strange (and kitted out with an eye-catching cover), but stronger in the set pieces than the internal logic. (Fantasy. 11-13)Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-210489-2
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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