An incredible story, told with respect and love, this deserves a wide readership. Just have the tissue box handy.
The Holocaust: a time of unimaginable horror, with moments of incandescence.
Following her picture book with Josée Bisaillon, Benno and the Night of Broken Glass (2010), Wiviott’s debut for teens, a novel in (largely excellent) verse, tells the fictionalized but carefully researched story surrounding one of those incandescent moments. In Auschwitz-Birkenau, Zlatka and Fania, Polish, Jewish, and determined to survive, become friends and replacement sisters. In each other, and in their small group of friends, they find strength. The titular heart is a tiny thing: a folded and stitched card penciled with birthday wishes that Zlatka creates for Fania for her 20th birthday, two years after she was captured trying to pass as Aryan. It is also a massive act of rebellion for every girl involved. It is, in the end, “A reason to take risks. / A reason to keep living.” If the heart were not an actual artifact (on display in Montreal), its metaphoric aptness might seem schmaltzy, but it is real, as are the transcribed wishes interspersed among the poems. Even in the darkness, light and love can survive, as Wiviott makes abundantly clear by picking a single thread from the millions of stories that occurred and stitching in context and facts to make both the larger horror and the smaller grace shine through.
An incredible story, told with respect and love, this deserves a wide readership. Just have the tissue box handy. (glossary, historical note, bibliography) (Historical fiction/verse. 12 & up)Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4814-3983-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: McElderry
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.
In this YA graphic novel, an alienated Métis girl learns about her people’s Canadian history.
Métis teenager Echo Desjardins finds herself living in a home away from her mother, attending a new school, and feeling completely lonely as a result. She daydreams in class and wanders the halls listening to a playlist of her mother’s old CDs. At home, she shuts herself up in her room. But when her history teacher begins to lecture about the Pemmican Wars of early 1800s Saskatchewan, Echo finds herself swept back to that time. She sees the Métis people following the bison with their mobile hunting camp, turning the animals’ meat into pemmican, which they sell to the Northwest Company in order to buy supplies for the winter. Echo meets a young girl named Marie, who introduces Echo to the rhythms of Métis life. She finally understands what her Métis heritage actually means. But the joys are short-lived, as conflicts between the Métis and their rivals in the Hudson Bay Company come to a bloody head. The tragic history of her people will help explain the difficulties of the Métis in Echo’s own time, including those of her mother and the teen herself. Accompanied by dazzling art by Henderson (A Blanket of Butterflies, 2017, etc.) and colorist Yaciuk (Fire Starters, 2016, etc.), this tale is a brilliant bit of time travel. Readers are swept back to 19th-century Saskatchewan as fully as Echo herself. Vermette’s (The Break, 2017, etc.) dialogue is sparse, offering a mostly visual, deeply contemplative juxtaposition of the present and the past. Echo’s eventual encounter with her mother (whose fate has been kept from readers up to that point) offers a powerful moment of connection that is both unexpected and affecting. “Are you…proud to be Métis?” Echo asks her, forcing her mother to admit, sheepishly: “I don’t really know much about it.” With this series opener, the author provides a bit more insight into what that means.
A sparse, beautifully drawn story about a teen discovering her heritage.Pub Date: March 15, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-55379-678-7
Page Count: 48
Publisher: HighWater Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An auspicious ending may seem a bit unlikely to some, but this novel has many appealing aspects that will draw readers in.
Fifteen-year-old Zeke gets a job and becomes involved with community organizers who aim to unionize local food-service workers in this novel in verse for reluctant readers.
Zeke hates their lives in the city with Paul, his alcoholic mom’s abusive boyfriend, a hypocritical Christian, and he misses his old home in small-town Wisconsin. Spurred to action by the idea of making enough money for them to move back, he takes a job at Casa de Pizza, where he comes to understand the desperate circumstances many of his minimum-wage–earning co-workers face. Zeke keeps the job secret, fearing Paul will try to steal his earnings. Pagelong free-verse poems evocatively describe Zeke’s experiences and quickly propel the story forward. The dynamics between the employees at Casa de Pizza (Zeke and several others are white, Timothy is black, Hannah is originally from Oaxaca) will be recognizable to teens who’ve worked in food service. Readers will easily sympathize with the all-too-true-to-life situations with which the characters are coping—racism and sexual harassment, Zeke’s awful home life, and a co-worker’s eviction with her children among them. Though short, this story develops the characters’ personalities, sketches in the history of the labor movement, and includes a subdued romantic subplot, effectively balancing these various elements.
An auspicious ending may seem a bit unlikely to some, but this novel has many appealing aspects that will draw readers in. (Fiction. 12-18)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5383-8260-8
Page Count: 202
Publisher: West 44 Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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