Adventures across a massive war and pandemic make for a tidy tribute to common understanding.
Five teenagers from across Europe lead coincidentally intersecting lives during World War I.
The day that 12-year-old Felix witnesses the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, everything changes. His father goes to war, and Felix loses the relative safety afforded to Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. His city is invaded by imperial Russia, and the Jews and Roma of Lemberg might be shipped to internment camps. With the help of Elsa, a German girl, Felix and his mother escape. Though they go their separate ways, Felix and Elsa will meet again, along with British Kara, French Juliette, and Russian Dimitri. Kara wants to be a doctor and works as an orderly on a Red Cross train, Juliette seeks her lost family, and Dimitri is a miserable soldier in the trenches. The chain of coincidences that repeatedly bring these teens into each other’s lives is increasingly improbable until they resolve five years later, on the last day of the war to end all wars. While the events are packed with historical facts, the overall framing feels ahistorical: the British are kind, competent rescuers; to be a good German requires being opposed to one’s countrymen; and a Russian sees “freedom” from both the tsar and Lenin in the land-mined French countryside.
Adventures across a massive war and pandemic make for a tidy tribute to common understanding. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 10-13)Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-338-62093-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2022
The exquisite writing can’t compensate for the story’s overwrought elements.
In Wolk’s latest, a self-contained girl finds companionship in one of the most notoriously unfriendly of places: a Maine island.
Twelve-year-old Lucretia and her mother, both artists, have moved to fictional Candle Island for the isolation; grieving the recent loss of Lucretia’s father and with a big secret to keep, they need to be where, as her mother says, “they’ll let us be who we are.” Lucretia soon draws the ire of prickly Murdock and the tentative friendship of Bastian, her cousin, two townies with secrets of their own. Among the island’s summer people are a nosy art critic and three young sociopaths, who all complicate life for Lucretia and her mother, though in very different ways. At a sentence level, this work glows. Lucretia hears sounds as colors (although synesthesia goes unmentioned), layering them onto her narration the way she applies her oils to canvas. Wolk’s characterization and plotting, however, waver. The children too often speak with a formality that’s not attributable to the late 1960s / early ’70s setting, and Lucretia’s self-possession frequently makes her feel far older than 12. The tense cultural backdrop would be an effective one for the exploration of Wolk’s themes were it not for the three summer kids’ flagrant evil, which leaches the story of its subtlety. Most characters present white.
The exquisite writing can’t compensate for the story’s overwrought elements. (Historical fiction. 10-13)Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780593698549
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: Dec. 28, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2025
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
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