Five years after Maddie, then a blossoming 13-year-old, left, she’s back for the summer in small-town Conway, S.C., all grown up with low-cut dresses to prove it, serving “penance” for the reputation she’s acquired. Fellow preacher’s kid Joshua, good because he’s always been that way (“Being the only son of the Reverend Isaiah P. Wynn, I was expected to never break the rules. Ever”), still sees his best friend underneath the lipstick and tight clothes. He realizes that saving her might be harder than he thinks, though, when he’s forced to disobey his worried, meddling parents, confront his saintly image and finally form his own opinions about premarital sex and sin. And when saving Maddie means saving himself in the process. Johnson avoids heavy-handed messages with nuanced characters and a realistic treatment of Joshua and Maddie’s complex relationship. Despite—or because of—his changes, Joshua remains a nice guy and proves that they can finish last, first or whenever or however they want. Unfortunately, the cover condemns this book to Girls Only. (Fiction. YA)
Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73804-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Feb. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
Categories: TEENS & YOUNG ADULT RELIGIOUS FICTION
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In Trujillo, in the Spanish Kingdom of Castile in 1481, Isabel is a Crypto-Jew; she and her family maintain their Jewish faith in secret.
The Inquisition is gaining control, but 16-year-old Isabel, who has a passion for writing poetry, thinks that as New Christians her family is safe. The family converted to Christianity and were baptized in the hope of making their lives easier and more secure. However, like many other Jews in Spain at the time, they privately practice Judaism—attending church on Sundays but conducting Shabbat dinners every Friday night. They think their secret is safe, but the head Inquisitor, Fray Tomás Torquemada, is now targeting conversos for their private Judaizing. When Isabel is betrothed against her will to the powerful and ruthless alguacil, or sheriff, Don Sancho, Isabel’s parents believe that the upcoming marriage will save them from persecution. But when handsome aristocrat Diego warns Isabel that she is in grave danger from the Inquisition and especially from her husband-to-be, Isabel is determined to save her family, herself, and the man she loves—and live an openly Jewish life filled with poetry. This historical romance is a fast-paced, plot-driven tale with feminist main characters whom readers will root for from the very beginning.
A charming Jewish love story set against the bleak backdrop of the Spanish Inquisition. (author’s note, photos, research notes, poetry citations, further reading) (Historical fiction. 14-18)Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-338-63418-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Scholastic
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
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BOOK REVIEW
Evil that is impossibly difficult to comprehend and filled with word-images that will leave readers gasping. The author’s...
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Gerta didn’t know she was Jewish until she and her father were taken for transport by the Nazis.
When Bergen-Belsen is liberated, Gerta and the other survivors are ill, skeletal, dying, or sunk in madness, and they have no homes to which they can return. Relating the events that led her there, she tells of a seemingly carefree life in Würzburg with her musician father and German gentile stepmother, an opera singer who is also Gerta’s voice teacher. But they were living with false identification papers, and their lives become ever more withdrawn. She has fleeting visions of her early childhood in Köln, of her mother, and of Kristallnacht. The cattle-car journey to Theresienstadt is only the beginning of days, weeks, months, years filled with unspeakable horrors in the “intricacies of the Nazi web…the animalization of human souls.” Then comes Auschwitz, where her father is gassed, then Bergen-Belsen, typhus, and, finally, a kind of awakening to her own humanity. Later she covertly enters British-occupied Palestine, Eratz Yisrael, and builds a life there. Stamper spares readers nothing. Everything that Gerta witnesses or experiences really happened in the hell that was the Holocaust, including the further humiliations in its aftermath, a rarely told part of the story. The text is on pale, sepia-toned paper with dark, eerie illustrations in the same tones, reminiscent of real drawings produced by camp inmates.
Evil that is impossibly difficult to comprehend and filled with word-images that will leave readers gasping. The author’s dedication says it all, in both Hebrew and English: “Remember.” (author’s note, map, glossary, resources, acknowledgments; not seen) (Historical fiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-0038-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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