Voyeurism becomes a route to healing for a girl overwhelmed with grief. Eleven-year-old Hallie’s life has been turned upside-down since her father was killed in a car accident and her mother has had to relocate to a dingy old apartment building in a city far from where Hallie grew up. Resentful toward her mother and unwilling to make friends in her new school, she finds respite from her misery by peeking out through a crack in a boarded-up attic window into an apartment in the building right next door. There she sees a beautiful teenage girl, her younger brother, and their perpetually angry father—does he pose a threat to his children? At first she just makes up stories about them, and then, when she makes friends with the little boy at the library, she involves herself actively in her fantasies about them. Very few writers can do atmosphere better than Snyder (Gib and the Gray Ghost, 2000, etc.), and the scenes of Hallie up in the stifling attic waiting breathlessly for the drama next door to unfold are highly effective. Somewhat less effective, but absorbing nevertheless, are Hallie’s detective efforts to discover just what is going on with that unhappy family. The answer is a letdown to Hallie (and to the reader), but without being aware of it, she has let her active grieving go in favor of her interest in the living—which is, of course, the burden of the story. For all its obviousness, it is a deftly told story with sympathetic characters, from one of the real veterans in the field. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: June 12, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-32764-1
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Playing on his customary theme that children have more on the ball than adults give them credit for, Clements (Big Al and Shrimpy, p. 951, etc.) pairs a smart, unhappy, rich kid and a small-town teacher too quick to judge on appearances. Knowing that he’ll only be finishing up the term at the local public school near his new country home before hieing off to an exclusive academy, Mark makes no special effort to fit in, just sitting in class and staring moodily out the window. This rubs veteran science teacher Bill Maxwell the wrong way, big time, so that even after Mark realizes that he’s being a snot and tries to make amends, all he gets from Mr. Maxwell is the cold shoulder. Matters come to a head during a long-anticipated class camping trip; after Maxwell catches Mark with a forbidden knife (a camp mate’s, as it turns out) and lowers the boom, Mark storms off into the woods. Unaware that Mark is a well-prepared, enthusiastic (if inexperienced) hiker, Maxwell follows carelessly, sure that the “slacker” will be waiting for rescue around the next bend—and breaks his ankle running down a slope. Reconciliation ensues once he hobbles painfully into Mark’s neatly organized camp, and the two make their way back together. This might have some appeal to fans of Gary Paulsen’s or Will Hobbs’s more catastrophic survival tales, but because Clements pauses to explain—at length—everyone’s history, motives, feelings, and mindset, it reads more like a scenario (albeit an empowering one, at least for children) than a story. Worthy—but just as Maxwell underestimates his new student, so too does Clement underestimate his readers’ ability to figure out for themselves what’s going on in each character’s life and head. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-689-82596-X
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
A child finds that being alone in a tiny tropical paradise has its ups and downs in this appealingly offbeat tale from the Australian author of Peeling the Onion (1999). Though her mother is long dead and her scientist father Jack has just sailed off on a quick expedition to gather plankton, Nim is anything but lonely on her small island home. Not only does she have constant companions in Selkie, a sea lion, and a marine iguana named Fred, but Chica, a green turtle, has just arrived for an annual egg-laying—and, through the solar-powered laptop, she has even made a new e-mail friend in famed adventure novelist Alex Rover. Then a string of mishaps darkens Nim’s sunny skies: her father loses rudder and dish antenna in a storm; a tourist ship that was involved in her mother’s death appears off the island’s reefs; and, running down a volcanic slope, Nim takes a nasty spill that leaves her feverish, with an infected knee. Though she lives halfway around the world and is in reality a decidedly unadventurous urbanite, Alex, short for “Alexandra,” sets off to the rescue, arriving in the midst of another storm that requires Nim and companions to rescue her. Once Jack brings his battered boat limping home, the stage is set for sunny days again. Plenty of comic, freely-sketched line drawings help to keep the tone light, and Nim, with her unusual associates and just-right mix of self-reliance and vulnerability, makes a character young readers won’t soon tire of. (Fiction. 10-12)
Pub Date: March 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-375-81123-0
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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