Perpetually angry, motherless Cammie O’Reilly, the warden’s daughter, sets about turning Eloda Pupko, the silent, distant trustee working as “Cammie-keeper,” into a mother figure over the summer she turns 13.
Set in 1959 in the Two Mills, Pennsylvania, of Spinelli's own childhood, this is firmly grounded in its time and place and full of details of life at Hancock County Prison. Cammie’s essential compassion shows in her willingness to spend time with all the incarcerated women, her particular affection for Boo Boo, a large, ebullient black woman who befriends the sad white child, and her disgust at best friend Reggie's admiration for their most famous inmate, a murderer. Reggie lusts for fame herself; one highlight of the summer is her appearance on the TV show Bandstand—watched and loudly applauded by a gang of rising Two Mills seventh-graders who are the friends who move into Cammie’s life without any apparent effort and who are firmly ejected as Cammie’s spiral into depression’s depths approaches its climax. Cammie tells her own story chronologically, until its whirlwind crest; she frames it with scenes from the present. It’s a tapestry of grief and redemption, woven by a master storyteller who never loses his focus on Cammie’s personal journey but connects it to Eloda’s in a powerful twist.
Moving and memorable. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-375-83199-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S FAMILY
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PROFILES
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
Categories: CHILDREN'S SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES
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The author of the Anastasia books as well as more serious fiction (Rabble Starkey, 1987) offers her first historical fiction—a story about the escape of the Jews from Denmark in 1943.
Five years younger than Lisa in Carol Matas' Lisa's War (1989), Annemarie Johansen has, at 10, known three years of Nazi occupation. Though ever cautious and fearful of the ubiquitous soldiers, she is largely unaware of the extent of the danger around her; the Resistance kept even its participants safer by telling them as little as possible, and Annemarie has never been told that her older sister Lise died in its service. When the Germans plan to round up the Jews, the Johansens take in Annemarie's friend, Ellen Rosen, and pretend she is their daughter; later, they travel to Uncle Hendrik's house on the coast, where the Rosens and other Jews are transported by fishing boat to Sweden. Apart from Lise's offstage death, there is little violence here; like Annemarie, the reader is protected from the full implications of events—but will be caught up in the suspense and menace of several encounters with soldiers and in Annemarie's courageous run as courier on the night of the escape. The book concludes with the Jews' return, after the war, to homes well kept for them by their neighbors.
A deftly told story that dramatizes how Danes appointed themselves bodyguards—not only for their king, who was in the habit of riding alone in Copenhagen, but for their Jews. (Historical fiction. 9-12)Pub Date: April 1, 1989
ISBN: 0547577095
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1989
Categories: CHILDREN'S SOCIAL THEMES | CHILDREN'S HISTORICAL FICTION
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