At the end of this well-crafted novella, when 13-year-old Polly and her mother finally share a companionable meal and level with each other, Polly compares the game in Ellis's title with her new insight into their relationship: ``You pull out one stick and the balance shifts and the whole pattern changes.'' Mum has just confided that, even before Polly was conceived, she understood that she didn't want to be married but she did want to bear and raise a child; and though the story has turned on their temporary estrangement, it's clear that the two constitute a richly individual family strengthened by their mutual regard. The rift is precipitated by their eviction from their low- rent home. Anxious and exasperated by Mum's sporadic attempts to find a new place, Polly opts to stay with Mum's brother and his family while Mum moves into the studio where she supports them by making stained glass. Affluent Uncle Roger provides his family with plenty of material things, but at his house there's none of the warm interaction that has nurtured Polly; a terrifying outing with her teenage cousin, which turns out to be a shoplifting and vandalism spree, quickly sends Polly back to a reconciliation with her mother. Crass Uncle Roger and his self-indulgent wife and daughter are one-dimensional foils for Polly, but other characters— including a sweet, retarded adult friend—are the kind of unique, well-rounded personalities readers expect from this fine Canadian author (A Family Project, 1988). A memorable portrait of a mother and daughter maturing and growing closer as the result of a challenging experience. (Fiction. 11-15)
Pub Date: March 31, 1992
ISBN: 0-689-50550-7
Page Count: 124
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1992
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish.
The dreary prospect of spending a lifetime making caskets instead of wonderful inventions prompts a young orphan to snatch up his little sister and flee. Where? To the circus, of course.
Fortunately or otherwise, John and 6-year-old Page join up with Boz—sometime human cannonball for the seedy Wandering Wayfarers and a “vertically challenged” trickster with a fantastic gift for sowing chaos. Alas, the budding engineer barely has time to settle in to begin work on an experimental circus wagon powered by chicken poop and dubbed (with questionable forethought) the Autopsy. The hot pursuit of malign and indomitable Great-Aunt Beauregard, the Coggins’ only living relative, forces all three to leave the troupe for further flights and misadventures. Teele spins her adventure around a sturdy protagonist whose love for his little sister is matched only by his fierce desire for something better in life for them both and tucks in an outstanding supporting cast featuring several notably strong-minded, independent women (Page, whose glare “would kill spiders dead,” not least among them). Better yet, in Boz she has created a scene-stealing force of nature, a free spirit who’s never happier than when he’s stirring up mischief. A climactic clutch culminating in a magnificently destructive display of fireworks leaves the Coggin sibs well-positioned for bright futures. (Illustrations not seen.)
A sly, side-splitting hoot from start to finish. (Adventure. 11-13)Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-234510-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Walden Pond Press/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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