A spare tale likely to engender deep, complex responses.
A young child undertakes a “secret mission” while her father is away at war.
First published from a French original in the 2015 collection The Great War: Stories Inspired by Items from the First World War but presented here in a small, neatly formatted volume with new illustrations, the tale features 5½-year-old Rosalie, who spends her days at the back of the one-room school while her mother is off at work. The older children and the teacher, a veteran who’s lost an arm, think she’s just dreaming and drawing pictures, but she’s actually engaged in a mission: “One day I’ll be awarded a medal for this. It’s already gleaming deep within me.” The nature of that mission comes clear one day when she sneaks home and discovers that she can finally read for herself the letters her father had been sending from the front—but instead of the optimistic, loving missives her mother had been “reading” to her, she discovers them to be dark cries of anguish and despair. That very day a final letter arrives…from the Ministry of War, with a medal enclosed. Rather than end with that crushingly ironic twist, though, de Fombelle leaves Rosalie smiling, through her tears, at a friend and regarding the medal not as a dead thing but something alive. The bright red hair of Rosalie and her mother seems to glow in the gray, wintry light of Arsenault’s village scenes, likewise offering hints of life and warmth even in the face of terrible loss. Everyone in view is white.
A spare tale likely to engender deep, complex responses. (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: June 11, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5362-0520-6
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Some readers may feel that the resolution comes a mite too easily, but most will enjoy the journey and be pleased when...
Two sisters make an unauthorized expedition to their former hometown and in the process bring together the two parts of their divided family.
Dooley packs plenty of emotion into this eventful road trip, which takes place over the course of less than 24 hours. Twelve-year-old Ophelia, nicknamed Fella, and her 16-year-old sister, Zoey Grace, aka Zany, are the daughters of a lesbian couple, Shannon and Lacy, who could not legally marry. The two white girls squabble and share memories as they travel from West Virginia to Asheville, North Carolina, where Zany is determined to scatter Mama Lacy’s ashes in accordance with her wishes. The year is 2004, before the Supreme Court decision on gay marriage, and the girls have been separated by hostile, antediluvian custodial laws. Fella’s present-tense narration paints pictures not just of the difficulties they face on the trip (a snowstorm, car trouble, and an unlikely thief among them), but also of their lives before Mama Lacy’s illness and of the ways that things have changed since then. Breathless and engaging, Fella’s distinctive voice is convincingly childlike. The conversations she has with her sister, as well as her insights about their relationship, likewise ring true. While the girls face serious issues, amusing details and the caring adults in their lives keep the tone relatively light.
Some readers may feel that the resolution comes a mite too easily, but most will enjoy the journey and be pleased when Fella’s family figures out how to come together in a new way . (Historical fiction. 10-14)Pub Date: April 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-16504-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
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