A lyrical but always unsettling, sometimes uncomfortable tale of medical experimentation in the 1960s South.
In this YA novel, a multiracial girl finds herself the subject of strange medical experiments in rural Alabama.
It’s the summer of 1968. Heat and drought have dried out the fields around Hyssop, where 12-year-old Margaret Ann Odom lives with her Black Cherokee mother, M’dear. Margaret Ann’s father, though she doesn’t know him, was White. One day, Claire Whitehurst, a White social worker from the just-opened Free Women’s Clinic, offers to enroll Margaret Ann in a program of “preventative medicine.” It involves weekly injections, and though M’dear doesn’t quite understand what they are for, she allows Margaret Ann to begin the treatment. Margaret Ann, for her part, is suspicious: “Why did this White woman think I wasn’t healthy? I thought I was healthy. I hadn’t had my monthlies yet, but I’d heard girls at school talk. Some had. Some hadn’t. ‘This about my monthlies?’ I cut my eyes under my brows to glance at my mother.” Margaret Ann is right to be wary, since none of the other kids in her class have to get the shots, and the clinic is housed in a long-abandoned building. The medicine, whatever it is, causes Margaret Ann to feel depressed, but the truth behind the treatment is even darker than she can imagine. The majority of the book is narrated by Margaret Ann, and Hunter gives her a poet’s eye for the world around her: “I once picked up an old burl out of the cow pasture and took it home. It had circles inside circles inside circles. Interesting how a mistake of nature can make something so beautiful. I understand now that’s my life. You live in the center of circles, each washing away from the other, like ripples in the cattle pond near the ridge.” Some readers may be turned off by the use of dialect and discussions surrounding skin color and hair texture, particularly given that the author is White. But the novel is based on a true story, one that many readers likely have never heard of, and Hunter tells it in a way that highlights the horrors.
A lyrical but always unsettling, sometimes uncomfortable tale of medical experimentation in the 1960s South.Pub Date: Feb. 7, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-949711-82-0
Page Count: 266
Publisher: Bluewater Publications
Review Posted Online: Dec. 11, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Sepetys’ flowing prose gently carries readers through the crushing tragedy of this tale that needs telling.
This bitterly sad, fluidly written historical novel tackles a topic woefully underdiscussed in English-language children’s fiction: Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror.
On June 14th, 1941, Soviet officers arrest 15-year-old Lina, her younger brother and her mother and deport them from Lithuania to Siberia. Their crammed-full boxcar is labeled, ludicrously, “Thieves and Prostitutes.” They work at a frigid gulag for eight months—hungry, filthy and brutalized by Soviet officers—before being taken to the Siberian Arctic and left without shelter. Lina doesn’t know the breadth of Stalin’s mass deportations of Baltic citizens, but she hears scraps of discussion about politics and World War II. Cold, starvation, exhaustion and disease (scurvy, dysentery, typhus) claim countless victims. Lina sketches urgently, passing her drawings along to other deportees, hoping they’ll reach Papa in a Soviet prison. Brief flashbacks, seamlessly interwoven, illuminate Lina’s sweet old life in Kaunas like flashes of light, eventually helping to reveal why the repressive, deadly regime targeted this family.
Sepetys’ flowing prose gently carries readers through the crushing tragedy of this tale that needs telling. (maps, timeline, author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-adult)Pub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-399-25412-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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