Her mother’s cancer surgery and anticipated follow-up treatment is the catalyst for Ginny’s trip to England, where she will live with her professor father, Hugh; she hasn’t seen him in a year, and hasn’t lived with him since her parents divorced. Ginny expects to be roughing it with Hugh on some kind of camping trip, but it turns out that Hugh is the leader of an experimental archaeology project; he and several others have re-created an Iron Age village and attempt to live as the villagers would have, growing their food, making tools and clothes, and sleeping in rudimentary shelters. Ginny is appalled at first but soon enters into the rhythms of the days there. Readers will be fascinated by the details of life there, but Stanley’s first novel begins to labor when Ginny runs away. Dirty, dressed in her Iron Age clothing, shoeless, and moneyless, Ginny finds her way to Hugh’s London home, and uses one of his credit cards to book a flight. Hugh locates her in Houston, and escorts her back to the settlement to finish out her stay while her mother continues to recover. The specifics of the Iron Age experiment are compelling, but the ending, as hasty in its pacing as the set-up was leisurely, is disappointingly feeble. (Fiction. 11- 14)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-16997-X
Page Count: 263
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1999
Revisiting characters from The Cook’s Family (1998), Yep again explores personal and cultural conflicts arising between the generations in a Chinese-American family. Suddenly saddled with caring for four younger siblings after a wealthy businessman hires her widowed mother as a governess—or amah—for his daughter, Stephanie, Amy Chin is forced to miss several ballet rehearsals for Cinderella, to listen to glowing accounts of Stephanie’s sophistication, and to accept expensive clothing and other gifts from her. While gaining new insight into how Cinderella’s stepsisters must have felt, Amy’s understandable resentment is compounded by the news that Stephanie will be moving in while her father is away on a trip. Yep builds that feeling to fever pitch, then dispels it by casting Stephanie as a lonely child hurt by one parent’s death and the other’s neglect; becoming friends, Stephanie and Amy clear the air and mend some fences with their well-meaning parents in a climactic face-off. The characters, most of them familiar from previous appearances, are distinct if not particularly complex, the San Francisco setting is vividly drawn, and the issues are laid out in plain terms and tidily resolved. It’s formulaic, but not entirely superficial. (Fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-399-23040-8
Page Count: 184
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
McLaren (Inside the Walls of Troy, 1996, etc.) writes of a girl’s wish to understand her new surroundings, and to be understood by those who love her. When Kate’s father decides to move back to his homeland to work as a lawyer for Hawaiian sovereignty, Kate is devastated at the thought of leaving their comfortable home and affluent lifestyle (not to mention a beloved pet) behind. From the first she hates Oahu and the seedy little apartment the family moves into. Worse, Kate enters school and discovers what it is to be part of a despised minority; she is half Hawaiian, but her fair looks brand her as haole, looked on with contempt at best. Even in her family she experiences rejection; her Hawaiian relatives more or less ignore Kate when they’re not fighting with her father over the means they should use to gain their freedom from the US government. Kate’s past training in ballet comes to her rescue when she learns the hula, the historic interpretive dance that is a major part of Hawaiian culture. To her surprise, her relatives realize that she is not just learning to dance beautifully but is coming to respect their traditions and way of life. It’s a fine story, made even more interesting through its the unflinching look at a place most mainlanders think of as a tropical paradise. (Fiction. 10-14)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-689-82393-2
Page Count: 143
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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