An unusual Holocaust novel told through the eyes of a cognizant, questioning teen.
Anneke Van Raalte’s nonpracticing Dutch Jewish family is sent to Theresienstadt, a concentration camp that the Nazis try to pass off as a model settlement.
Fourteen in 1943, she lives through two years of scarce food, bedbugs, forced labor, and little privacy. Still, life here is preferential to being transported to death camps like Auschwitz, a fate suffered by many, including her best friend and the boy with whom she falls in love. Her family survives, but the Russian liberators and Dutch military are later suspicious: Did her father’s artistic work keep the family alive? Anneke struggles with these thoughts. She details the Nazis’ grandiose plans for the Embellishment, a facade created to fool the 1944 Danish Red Cross committee, which included her father’s fairy-tale murals in the children’s infirmary. In this first-person narrative, Anneke is keenly aware of the moral choices her father and other artists make even as they create clandestine drawings documenting their true plight. This novel, based on the author’s mother’s memories and a book by her maternal grandfather, cartoonist and illustrator Jo Spier, explores the situation of artists who were used by the Nazis to help cover up their heinous crimes. Originally published in 2008, this edition includes a new preface and references. Polak writes authentically, including appropriate details about the camp’s horrors and insights into her protagonist’s conflicted feelings about friendship, romance, family, and religion.
An unusual Holocaust novel told through the eyes of a cognizant, questioning teen. (author’s note, organizations) (Historical fiction. 12-16)Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4598-3303-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Orca
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2022
Dark, seductive, but over-the-top: Characters and book alike will enthrall those who choose to play.
Garber returns to the world of bestseller Caraval (2017), this time with the focus on younger, more daring sister Donatella.
Valenda, capital of the empire, is host to the second of Legend’s magical games in a single year, and while Scarlett doesn’t want to play again, blonde Tella is eager for a chance to prove herself. She is haunted by the memory of her death in the last game and by the cursed Deck of Destiny she used as a child which foretold her loveless future. Garber has changed many of the rules of her expanding world, which now appears to be infused with magic and evil Fates. Despite a weak plot and ultraviolet prose (“He tasted like exquisite nightmares and stolen dreams, like the wings of fallen angels, and bottles of fresh moonlight.”), this is a tour de force of imagination. Themes of love, betrayal, and the price of magic (and desire) swirl like Caraval’s enchantments, and Dante’s sensuous kisses will thrill readers as much as they do Tella. The convoluted machinations of the Prince of Hearts (one of the Fates), Legend, and even the empress serve as the impetus for Tella’s story and set up future volumes which promise to go bigger. With descriptions focusing primarily on clothing, characters’ ethnicities are often indeterminate.
Dark, seductive, but over-the-top: Characters and book alike will enthrall those who choose to play. (glossary) (Fantasy. 12-16)Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-09531-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember.
Kai’s life is upended when his coastal village is devastated in Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami in this verse novel from an author who experienced them firsthand.
With his single mother, her parents, and his friend Ryu among the thousands missing or dead, biracial Kai, 17, is dazed and disoriented. His friend Shin’s supportive, but his intact family reminds Kai, whose American dad has been out of touch for years, of his loss. Kai’s isolation is amplified by his uncertain cultural status. Playing soccer and his growing friendship with shy Keiko barely lessen his despair. Then he’s invited to join a group of Japanese teens traveling to New York to meet others who as teenagers lost parents in the 9/11 attacks a decade earlier. Though at first reluctant, Kai agrees to go and, in the process, begins to imagine a future. Like graphic novels, today’s spare novels in verse (the subgenre concerning disasters especially) are significantly shaped by what’s left out. Lacking art’s visceral power to grab attention, verse novels may—as here—feel sparsely plotted with underdeveloped characters portrayed from a distance in elegiac monotone. Kai’s a generic figure, a coat hanger for the disaster’s main event, his victories mostly unearned; in striking contrast, his rural Japanese community and how they endure catastrophe and overwhelming losses—what they do and don’t do for one another, comforts they miss, kindnesses they value—spring to life.
It’s the haunting details of those around Kai that readers will remember. (author preface, afterword) (Verse fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-553-53474-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2015
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