Readers will rally behind the story’s determined and courageous protagonist.
A girl slowly realizes that life with her father is not as it should be.
In this novel narrated in the first person, Rebecca relates the strangeness of life with her father, whom she refers to by name as Joe. They frequently move around Toronto; she shops in thrift stores, only buying the baggy clothes that he insists upon; she has never attended school; and she rarely has friends her own age. Joe, who carries no government ID, controls her life, not even allowing a news photographer to take her picture at a book festival. When Rebecca asks about their family, he tells her that they are all dead. Rebecca, whose voice is precise and slightly formal, finds kinship in characters from literature. Inspired by her reading of Harriet the Spy, she eavesdrops and, à la Blanche in A Streetcar Named Desire, she appreciates the kindness of her adult neighbors—especially Mrs. Martino, the motherly Italian neighbor who loves to cook, and Phoebe, a reclusive movie star who encourages her to write down her story. Slowly, memories surface: Recollections of a bunny and a fascination with Audrey Hepburn lead her to ask questions that Joe will not answer. It is Rebecca’s initiative that ultimately leads to the resolution of this absorbing tale. This short novel deals with family dysfunction through the eyes of a young person through a central mystery that gradually unfurls.
Readers will rally behind the story’s determined and courageous protagonist. (recipe, author interview) (Fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: April 1, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-88995-619-3
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Red Deer Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2021
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
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel.
A Holocaust tale with a thin “Hansel and Gretel” veneer from the author of The Devil’s Arithmetic (1988).
Chaim and Gittel, 14-year-old twins, live with their parents in the Lodz ghetto, forced from their comfortable country home by the Nazis. The siblings are close, sharing a sign-based twin language; Chaim stutters and communicates primarily with his sister. Though slowly starving, they make the best of things with their beloved parents, although it’s more difficult once they must share their tiny flat with an unpleasant interfaith couple and their Mischling (half-Jewish) children. When the family hears of their impending “wedding invitation”—the ghetto idiom for a forthcoming order for transport—they plan a dangerous escape. Their journey is difficult, and one by one, the adults vanish. Ultimately the children end up in a fictional child labor camp, making ammunition for the German war effort. Their story effectively evokes the dehumanizing nature of unremitting silence. Nevertheless, the dense, distancing narrative (told in a third-person contemporaneous narration focused through Chaim with interspersed snippets from Gittel’s several-decades-later perspective) has several consistency problems, mostly regarding the relative religiosity of this nominally secular family. One theme seems to be frustration with those who didn’t fight back against overwhelming odds, which makes for a confusing judgment on the suffering child protagonists.
Stands out neither as a folk-tale retelling, a coming-of-age story, nor a Holocaust novel. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 12-14)Pub Date: March 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-25778-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Philomel
Review Posted Online: Dec. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2018
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