This utterly fresh and winning collection of verse is in the voice of an unnamed teenager, whom readers will come to know really well through her introspective and spot-on observations. During the course of a school year in California that is divided into sections (Autumn, Winter, Spring), she welcomes back her best friend Leslie and then has a fight with her, plays Mozart duets on her violin with Yen-Mei, and learns about kissing with Carlo. She is a writer, and she works at it, and she’s dazzled when her teacher, in his honey-sweet Tennessee accent, suggests she’s good enough to be published in “Faan Powms.” She tries out for drama club, hangs out with her Great Aunt Ida, and ruefully examines her pull-and-tug relationship with an older sister. Employing many forms of verse, some rhymed, some not, she even writes a sonnet; all of them are accessible and exquisitely crafted. “Rehearsal” says in its entirety: “This music is so / amazing, it builds a nest / of tears in my throat.” She notes wryly when an annoying boy stops hanging around her “And lately I have missed / being annoyed.” Clayton’s (Three Rotten Eggs, p. 339, etc.) illustrations, a mix of collage and sketches, hint at each subject often in amusing or wry corollaries. The narrator says a great deal about writing: “I want to / make something / beautiful. / Peaches. / If I could / make peaches—grow them / from my pen . . . ” She gets her wish. (author’s note) (Poetry. 11-14)
Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-80158-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Hall (The Oxford Book of Children’s Verse in America, 1985, etc.), offers up a chestnut-flavored alternative for younger readers, matching roughly contemporary illustrations to one or two selections from each of 57 American poets. To the usual suspects—Eugene Field’s “Wynken, Blynken and Nod,” Emily Dickinson’s “I’m nobody, who are you?” and even Carl Sandburg’s “Fog”—he adds more recent works from the likes of Jack Prelutsky, Gary Soto, Sandra Cisneros, and Janet S. Wong; he also includes three poems attributed somewhat baldly to an “Anonymous Native American.” The art comprises a gallery of American illustration, from crude 18th-century woodcuts, through Jessie Willcox Smith, to Marcia Brown and the Dillons. Writing that “poetry is most poetry when it makes noise,” Hall recommends these verses for reading aloud and memorization, exhorting parents and children to appreciate how they “preserve a moment of the American past.” A safe collection, seldom veering from the canon. (index) (Poetry. 9-11)
Pub Date: Nov. 11, 1999
ISBN: 0-19-512373-5
Page Count: 93
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
Concisely captures big, serious ideas about life and relationships.
An eighth grader in Greenwich Village finds solace in a kindred spirit during turbulent times.
Emily has loved books ever since leaving the orphanage in China to live with her white adoptive parents. But now that she’s been forced to move to Chien-Shiung Wu School (“named for a physicist who… // …was a total badass”), reading is a lifeline. Losing touch with her best friends and the scariness of the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic are bad enough. Even worse: Almost everyone at her new school speaks Cantonese and is already learning Mandarin. It’s just Emily and a few white and Black kids who are beginning speakers. Her family expects her to feel grateful for a chance to “get in touch with her roots.” Instead she feels exposed, embarrassed by her lack of cultural and linguistic knowledge. Amid her loneliness, she discovers Emily Dickinson, whose poems help her process complicated feelings about adoption, loss, race, and belonging. There’s also a mysterious connection between the two Emilys—could Dickinson’s ghost be guiding Emily to open up to new possibilities like making friends? Many readers will find this verse novel’s approach to Dickinson’s poems illuminating: They’re riddles to be solved, presented alongside contemporary Emily’s rephrased passages. Insights from adults in Emily’s life offer wisdom that readers may find thought provoking, although they may wish for some humor to offer occasional reprieve from the heavy themes.
Concisely captures big, serious ideas about life and relationships. (books and art referenced) (Verse fiction. 11-14)Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2024
ISBN: 9780593567012
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Make Me a World
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
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