Expressive but incomplete; share it with other Holocaust books or lots of caregiver context.
Women in Auschwitz secretly make a birthday gift.
This historical piece uses a frame story with a temporal double-remove: a first-person narrator looks back to the time “When I was young” and learned about her mother’s Holocaust experience. Narrator Sorale is a blank; her mother, Fania, is the real protagonist, turning 20 in the Nazi camp. Fania’s friends, despite the danger, craft her “a tiny book shaped like a heart, no bigger than a butterfly,” filled with handwritten messages. Sorale and Fania (white and Jewish) have awkwardly frozen faces and stiff hands in the frame story’s illustrations, but Rudnicki shows Auschwitz’s oppressiveness hauntingly in tertiary blues and pale, rusty orange-beiges. His rows of prisoners in stripes, with similar faces and skin creepily matching the backgrounds, powerfully evoke dehumanization and even imply disappearance. However, readers unfamiliar with the Holocaust won’t get all of that. They’ll absorb the fear, crowding, hunger, and cold of Auschwitz, but the “great darkness” that stole Fania’s family remains enigmatic—gassing and mass extermination are unmentioned. Death looms explicitly but not the scope or means—the threat sounds individual. Fania’s friends’ fates are unaddressed. An author’s note adds some historical detail and photographs of the actual book, which lives at the Montreal Holocaust Museum.
Expressive but incomplete; share it with other Holocaust books or lots of caregiver context. (author’s note) (Picture book. 8-11)Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-77260-057-5
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Second Story Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
SEEN & HEARD
Certain to elicit both gales of giggles and winces of sympathy (not to mention recognition) from young readers.
First volume of a planned three, this edited version of an ongoing online serial records a middle-school everykid’s triumphs and (more often) tribulations through the course of a school year.
Largely through his own fault, mishaps seem to plague Greg at every turn, from the minor freak-outs of finding himself permanently seated in class between two pierced stoners and then being saddled with his mom for a substitute teacher, to being forced to wrestle in gym with a weird classmate who has invited him to view his “secret freckle.” Presented in a mix of legible “hand-lettered” text and lots of simple cartoon illustrations with the punch lines often in dialogue balloons, Greg’s escapades, unwavering self-interest and sardonic commentary are a hoot and a half.
Certain to elicit both gales of giggles and winces of sympathy (not to mention recognition) from young readers. (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: April 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-8109-9313-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2007
SEEN & HEARD
PERSPECTIVES
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