Haunting.
In 1706, 14 years after the infamous Salem witch trials, accuser Ann Putnam Jr. publicly apologized for her role; from that documentary evidence, Crane and Decker spin an airy, atmospheric graphic-novel examination of a legacy of guilt.
After the briefest of introductions, the book opens on a tormented Ann Putnam in 1706. Both her parents having died seven years earlier, she has been de facto parent to her nine siblings; shockingly, she does not miss either of them. Through visions and flashbacks, readers get a sense of the role Ann’s parents played in her crime, exploiting their 12-year-old daughter to take the land of the accused. Her fictional recollections of her victims are interleaved with abbreviated transcripts from the trials and expressed in even, formal language. All is illustrated with Decker’s fine-lined drawings that evoke both the surreal details of the accusations and the pastoral Colonial setting. His characters’ faces have just the merest hint of individuality, which is fitting for a tale of communal guilt but also has the effect of keeping Ann something of a visual cipher. More impressionistic than expository, this treatment, which closes with the text of Ann’s apology, is no substitute for a thoroughgoing narrative history, but its attempt to understand the effects of the trials on one of its villains is provocative, to say the least.
Haunting. (afterword) (Graphic historical fiction. 12-18)Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-939017-33-8
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Islandport Press
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
A bone-chilling tale not to be ignored by the universe.
If Anne Frank had been a boy, this is the story her male counterpart might have told. At least, the very beginning of this historical novel reads as such.
It is 1939, and Yanek Gruener is a 10-year old Jew in Kraków when the Nazis invade Poland. His family is forced to live with multiple other families in a tiny apartment as his beloved neighborhood of Podgórze changes from haven to ghetto in a matter of weeks. Readers will be quickly drawn into this first-person account of dwindling freedoms, daily humiliations and heart-wrenching separations from loved ones. Yet as the story darkens, it begs the age-old question of when and how to introduce children to the extremes of human brutality. Based on the true story of the life of Jack Gruener, who remarkably survived not just one, but 10 different concentration camps, this is an extraordinary, memorable and hopeful saga told in unflinching prose. While Gratz’s words and early images are geared for young people, and are less gory than some accounts, Yanek’s later experiences bear a closer resemblance to Elie Wiesel’s Night than more middle-grade offerings, such as Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars. It may well support classroom work with adult review first.
A bone-chilling tale not to be ignored by the universe. (Historical fiction. 12 & up)Pub Date: March 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-545-45901-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch.
A Jewish girl joins up with Polish resistance groups to fight for her people against the evils of the Holocaust.
Chaya Lindner is forcibly separated from her family when they are consigned to the Jewish ghetto in Krakow. The 16-year-old is taken in by the leaders of Akiva, a fledgling Jewish resistance group that offers her the opportunity to become a courier, using her fair coloring to pass for Polish and sneak into ghettos to smuggle in supplies and information. Chaya’s missions quickly become more dangerous, taking her on a perilous journey from a disastrous mission in Krakow to the ghastly ghetto of Lodz and eventually to Warsaw to aid the Jews there in their gathering uprising inside the walls of the ghetto. Through it all, she is partnered with a secretive young girl whom she is reluctant to trust. The trajectory of the narrative skews toward the sensational, highlighting moments of resistance via cinematic action sequences but not pausing to linger on the emotional toll of the Holocaust’s atrocities. Younger readers without sufficient historical knowledge may not appreciate the gravity of the events depicted. The principal characters lack depth, and their actions and the situations they find themselves in often require too much suspension of disbelief to pass for realism.
Sensitive subject matter that could have benefited from a subtler, more sober touch. (afterword) (Historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-338-14847-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
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