Just as 11-year-old Franny Chapman squabbles with her once-best friend in their neighborhood near Andrews Air Force Base, outside of Washington, D.C., President Kennedy and Chairman Khrushchev are also at odds. Franny’s spot-on “Heavens to Murgatroyd” dialogue captures the trepidation as the world holds its breath during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. Adding to the pressure are her college-student, activist older sister, who may be a spy, her aspiring-astronaut younger brother, who refuses to eat, her steely, chain-smoking mother, who has inexplicably burst into tears, her often-absent pilot father, now spending long days on base, and her PTSD-suffering, World War I–veteran Uncle Otts, who’s digging up the front yard to build a bomb shelter. Wiles’s “documentary novel,” based on her own childhood memories and the first in The Sixties Project trilogy, has a striking scrapbook feel, with ingeniously selected and placed period photographs, cartoons, essays, song lyrics, quotations, advertisements and “duck and cover” instructions interspersed through the narrative. References to duct tape (then newly invented), McDonald’s and other pop culture lend authenticity to this phenomenal story of the beginnings of radical change in America. (historical note, author’s note, bibliography) (Historical fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-545-10605-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: June 23, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2010
It’s great to see these kids “so enthusiastic about committing high treason.” (historical note) (Historical fiction. 10-12)
Near the end of World War II, two kids join their parents in a plot to kill Adolf Hitler.
Max, 12, lives with his parents and his older sister in a Berlin that’s under constant air bombardment. During one such raid, a mortally wounded man stumbles into the white German family’s home and gasps out his last wish: “The Führer must die.” With this nighttime visitation, Max and Gerta discover their parents have been part of a resistance cell, and the siblings want in. They meet a colorful band of upper-class types who seem almost too whimsical to be serious. Despite her charming levity, Prussian aristocrat and cell leader Frau Becker is grimly aware of the stakes. She enlists Max and Gerta as couriers who sneak forged identification papers to Jews in hiding. Max and Gerta are merely (and realistically) cogs in the adults’ plans, but there’s plenty of room for their own heroism. They escape capture, rescue each other when they’re caught out during an air raid, and willingly put themselves repeatedly at risk to catch a spy. The fictional plotters—based on a mix of several real anti-Hitler resistance cells—are portrayed with a genuine humor, giving them the space to feel alive even in such a slim volume.
It’s great to see these kids “so enthusiastic about committing high treason.” (historical note) (Historical fiction. 10-12)Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-338-35902-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Jan. 20, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
A tween gets in over his head in this introspective and nostalgic story.
Thirteen-year-old Joey Goodman spends every August in Atlantic City, New Jersey, at his grandparents’ hotel.
It’s 1975, and the city is soon to become a gambling resort as old hotels are replaced with casinos. Joey’s passion is playing Skee-Ball at the boardwalk arcades. There, he attracts the attention of shady Artie Bishop, known as the king of Steel Pier, and becomes involved in Bishop’s unspecified criminal activities. Suave Artie engages Joey in conversation about the boy’s favorite book, The Once and Future King, and Joey begins to regard him almost as a new King Arthur. Artie offers him a job chaperoning his daughter, Melanie, when she comes to visit. After Joey finishes his unpaid waiter’s shift at the hotel restaurant each day, he lies to his family, meets Melanie, and they explore the piers’ seedy amusements. Joey falls for 15-year-old Melanie, and she regards him fondly but is attracted to his older brother Reuben. The close-knit Jewish family of four bickering brothers, parents, uncle, and grandparents (especially wise grandpa Zeyde) is lovingly portrayed. The descriptions of Joey’s ponderings about God (he’s had his bar mitzvah but is undecided) and Artie’s business dealings may not hold young readers’ interest, and the immersive setting could appeal more to adults old enough to remember the time and place. All characters are presumed White.
A tween gets in over his head in this introspective and nostalgic story. (author’s note) (Fiction. 10-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-72843-034-8
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Kar-Ben
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
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