From Wilson (The Suitcase Kid, 1997, etc.), a lightweight British import that is a telling study of twindom's trials and tribulations. Doing their best to make everyone miserable in the process, ten-year-old identical twins Ruby and Garnet reluctantly adapt to changes in their family and themselves in this revealing double journal. As close in other ways as twins can be, Ruby is otherwise as rude and bossy as Garnet is shy and wimpy. Ruby doesn't like Rose, the new woman in their father Richard's life, nor his decision to move to a small town and open a bookshop, nor their new teacher, nor their classmates, so Garnet trails along on a campaign of pranks and bad behavior, offering only token resistance. Then the twins, at Ruby's instigation, take an entrance exam for an expensive boarding school and only Garnet is offered a scholarship. Wilson works with a broad brush, exaggerating the differences in the twins' personalities, and endowing Rose and Richard with inhuman funds of patience. While readers will spend most of the book wondering why Ruby wasn't strangled long ago, she takes the impending separation from her twin so much harder than Garnet that she becomes a tragic figure. In the end, the two part with hugs and tears, and start making new friends almost immediately. Their alternating accountsRuby's long and chatty, Garnet's short but eloquentare illustrated with simple black-and-white drawings, each twin done by a different artist, to no distinguishable effect. (Fiction. 9-11)
Pub Date: March 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-32312-3
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1998
Though it lacks nuance, still a must-read.
Tyler is the son of generations of Vermont dairy farmers.
Mari is the Mexican-born daughter of undocumented migrant laborers whose mother has vanished in a perilous border crossing. When Tyler’s father is disabled in an accident, the only way the family can afford to keep the farm is by hiring Mari’s family. As Tyler and Mari’s friendship grows, the normal tensions of middle-school boy-girl friendships are complicated by philosophical and political truths. Tyler wonders how he can be a patriot while his family breaks the law. Mari worries about her vanished mother and lives in fear that she will be separated from her American-born sisters if la migra comes. Unashamedly didactic, Alvarez’s novel effectively complicates simple equivalencies between what’s illegal and what’s wrong. Mari’s experience is harrowing, with implied atrocities and immigration raids, but equally full of good people doing the best they can. The two children find hope despite the unhappily realistic conclusions to their troubles, in a story which sees the best in humanity alongside grim realities.
Though it lacks nuance, still a must-read. (Fiction. 9-11)Pub Date: Jan. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-375-85838-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2008
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
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