A poignant and eloquent reflection on tradition, family, friendship, and tragedy.
A young girl’s assumptions about life are challenged by the arrival of a new teacher in Rabin’s historical YA novel.
In Canada’s vast Manitoba prairie sits the fictional town of Ambrosia. It has a thriving Jewish community that’s made up of immigrants who fled the Russian pogroms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s here, in 1948, that readers meet 11-year-old Mira Adler, who narrates this coming-of-age tale. She’s a happy, imaginative youngster who attends the Peretz School, a learning center that teaches “English” studies in the morning and Jewish studies in the afternoon. The latter classes are taught primarily in Yiddish, a language that Rabin uses liberally in dialogue and narration throughout the novel, always followed by helpful translation. Mira states that “my world was an untroubled one, and in my naiveté and innocence, I assumed that it was the same for everyone.” That changes after the arrival of Chaver Bergman, a new, young Yiddish teacher. “There was something affecting and melancholy about him,” Mira says, “engendering rachmonos(pity) rather than gleeful mischief.” When he offers Mira private violin lessons, they build a friendship that leads him to share the story of his tragic past. Born in Czechoslovakia, he’s a tormented, guilt-ridden Holocaust survivor who was once a virtuoso violinist but no longer plays. His instruction is verbal, inspiring Mira with visual images of music that inflect Rabin’s prose with moments of beauty with joyful and mournful tones: “He told me to imagine leaves swirling in the wind when playing Vivaldi’s ‘Autumn’ from The Four Seasons, each little leaf being carried aloft on a current of cool air.” Her descriptions of daily life, traditional foods, and celebrations paint an evocative portrait of second-generation Jewish diaspora life in the West. And Mira’s growing awareness of anti-Semitism outside her small enclave provides readers with a timely reminder of the need to remain vigilant against bigotry. Overall, it’s a compelling work with a wistful longing for days of childhood innocence.
A poignant and eloquent reflection on tradition, family, friendship, and tragedy.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5255-7636-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Nov. 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sepetys’ flowing prose gently carries readers through the crushing tragedy of this tale that needs telling.
This bitterly sad, fluidly written historical novel tackles a topic woefully underdiscussed in English-language children’s fiction: Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror.
On June 14th, 1941, Soviet officers arrest 15-year-old Lina, her younger brother and her mother and deport them from Lithuania to Siberia. Their crammed-full boxcar is labeled, ludicrously, “Thieves and Prostitutes.” They work at a frigid gulag for eight months—hungry, filthy and brutalized by Soviet officers—before being taken to the Siberian Arctic and left without shelter. Lina doesn’t know the breadth of Stalin’s mass deportations of Baltic citizens, but she hears scraps of discussion about politics and World War II. Cold, starvation, exhaustion and disease (scurvy, dysentery, typhus) claim countless victims. Lina sketches urgently, passing her drawings along to other deportees, hoping they’ll reach Papa in a Soviet prison. Brief flashbacks, seamlessly interwoven, illuminate Lina’s sweet old life in Kaunas like flashes of light, eventually helping to reveal why the repressive, deadly regime targeted this family.
Sepetys’ flowing prose gently carries readers through the crushing tragedy of this tale that needs telling. (maps, timeline, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-adult)Pub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-25412-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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