Sometimes suspenseful and always engaging, this snapshot of determined Gusta and life before the war is sure to captivate...
It’s 1941, and Gusta, 11, has been sent—actually nearly abandoned—to the care of her grandmother in a small Maine town.
Her father, a German immigrant and labor organizer, is on the run from the law, and her mother is struggling financially in New York City, so it seems to make sense for Gusta to go to a loving, if a bit austere, grandmother who takes in foster children anyway. In Springdale, she meets chatty Josie, already in high school and seemingly the dominant one in the blur of foster children. If Gusta is to thrive in this strange new setting, it’ll be by virtue of her spirit—and perhaps her beloved French horn, which she plays with considerable talent. She, Josie, and a cousin, Bess, create their own small band. This leads, almost inevitably, to an unexpected clash with a wealthy mill owner, whose secret connection with Gusta’s aunt Marion threatens to derail Gusta in this immersive, character-driven tale. She’s believably caught between her desire to do what’s right, fighting back against growing prejudice against foreigners and unfair treatment of workers, and her need for comfort and security in an alien, sometimes-threatening new environment. Although the characters are white, this effort nicely captures the myriad faces of prejudice.
Sometimes suspenseful and always engaging, this snapshot of determined Gusta and life before the war is sure to captivate readers. (Historical fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7636-8804-2
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Candlewick
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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