In a historical novel that, in the wake of Goodman’s Winter Hare (1996), seems tepid, Tory kidnappers bundle a Connecticut patriot’s daughter over the Sound to Long Island, where she endures mistreatment before undertaking the arduous journey home. Seized in lieu of her father, away on business for General Washington, Hope escapes before she can be sold to a slave trader, and with her captor’s aged mother, Maude, makes her way to a war-torn but bustling New York City. Unfortunately, bands of raiders have brought northbound travel to a standstill. Hope frets over the protracted delay, fearing her pursuers, but then smallpox strikes. Hope loses her dear companion, and almost dies herself; after a long convalescence in the care of a British officer’s wife, she again escapes, and a crusty old suitor of Maude’s sails her across enemy lines to a happy reunion with her family. Hope’s path is smoothed by plenty of adult friends, plus a convenient stash of family silver to cover expenses, and neither Goodman’s sketchy descriptions of Revolutionary War—era New York, nor her characters, who are either types or quirky to the point of impenetrability, contribute to the sense of time and place; still, although she is not the most self-reliant of heroines, Hope faces and overcomes her own fears’specifically her terror of heights—as well as physical hazards in the course of her journey back. (Fiction. 10-13)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-395-86195-0
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
From England’s Children’s Laureate, a searing WWI-era tale of a close extended family repeatedly struck by adversity and injustice. On vigil in the trenches, 17-year-old Thomas Peaceful looks back at a childhood marked by guilt over his father’s death, anger at the shabby treatment his strong-minded mother receives from the local squire and others—and deep devotion to her, to his brain-damaged brother Big Joe, and especially to his other older brother Charlie, whom he has followed into the army by lying about his age. Weaving telling incidents together, Morpurgo surrounds the Peacefuls with mean-spirited people at home, and devastating wartime experiences on the front, ultimately setting readers up for a final travesty following Charlie’s refusal of an order to abandon his badly wounded brother. Themes and small-town class issues here may find some resonance on this side of the pond, but the particular cultural and historical context will distance the story from American readers—particularly as the pace is deliberate, and the author’s hints about where it’s all heading are too rare and subtle to create much suspense. (Fiction. 11-13, adult)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-439-63648-5
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
In an intense, well-researched tale that will resonate particularly with readers in parts of the country where the West Nile virus and other insect-borne diseases are active, Anderson (Speak, 1999, etc.) takes a Philadelphia teenager through one of the most devastating outbreaks of yellow fever in our country’s history. It’s 1793, and though business has never been better at the coffeehouse run by Matilda’s widowed, strong-minded mother in what is then the national capital, vague rumors of disease come home to roost when the serving girl dies without warning one August night. Soon church bells are ringing ceaselessly for the dead as panicked residents, amid unrelenting heat and clouds of insects, huddle in their houses, stream out of town, or desperately submit to the conflicting dictates of doctors. Matilda and her mother both collapse, and in the ensuing confusion, they lose track of each other. Witnessing people behaving well and badly, Matilda first recovers slowly in a makeshift hospital, then joins the coffeehouse’s cook, Emma, a free African-American, in tending to the poor and nursing three small, stricken children. When at long last the October frosts signal the epidemic’s end, Emma and Matilda reopen the coffeehouse as partners, and Matilda’s mother turns up—alive, but a trembling shadow of her former self. Like Paul Fleischman’s Path of the Pale Horse (1983), which has the same setting, or Anna Myers’s Graveyard Girl (1995), about a similar epidemic nearly a century later, readers will find this a gripping picture of disease’s devastating effect on people, and on the social fabric itself. (Fiction. 11-13)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-689-83858-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
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