A valuable tribute to the spirit of resistance.
Former U.K. Children’s Laureate Rosen returns with a picture-book look at a Holocaust history he’s previously explored in poetry and prose biography.
Eugène Handschuh and his father, both Hungarian Jewish fighters in the communist resistance, are arrested and sent to a Nazi internment camp. Eugène and his friends dig an escape tunnel but are caught and loaded onto a train to Auschwitz; he and his father are eventually separated. Rosen describes Eugène’s escape and miraculous reunification with his father in matter-of-fact language that showcases the young man’s determination. Yoto Carnegie Medal nominee Phillips’ lovely ink, pencil, and charcoal illustrations match the text tonally. Even as Eugène discusses beatings, torture, and starvation, the illustrated prisoners all appear calm and unwounded. Still, a double-page spread of the escapees fleeing the train is gut-wrenching, a pop of color appearing on the darkened tracks as Eugène’s father falls. Unmentioned here is Rosen’s personal connection: Eugène’s deportation train is Convoy 62, the same train that carried Rosen’s murdered uncle and aunt—subjects of On the Move (2022) and The Missing (2020)—to their deaths in Auschwitz. Eugène, who returns to the resistance once he’s free, movingly pays tribute to those who didn’t escape the convoy. “You may ask, where did the train go? / What happened to the twelve hundred people on that train? / There were nineteen of us who jumped / on that one day. / The rest went to Auschwitz. / Only twenty-nine came back.”
A valuable tribute to the spirit of resistance. (author’s note) (Picture-book biography. 7-10)Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9781536238945
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Candlewick Studio
Review Posted Online: Aug. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2025
Shot through with vague generalities and paired to a mix of equally generic period images and static new art, this overview remorselessly sucks all the juice from its topic.
This survey of the growth of industries in this country from the Colonial period to the post–World War II era is written in the driest of textbook-ese: “Factories needed good transportation so that materials could reach them and so that materials could reach buyers”; “The metal iron is obtained by heating iron ore”; “In 1860, the North said that free men, not slaves, should do the work.” This text is supplemented by a jumble of narrative-overview blocks, boxed side observations and terse captions on each thematic spread. The design is packed with overlapping, misleadingly seamless and rarely differentiated mixes of small, heavily trimmed contemporary prints or (later) photos and drab reconstructions of workshop or factory scenes, along with pictures of significant inventions and technological innovations (which are, in several cases, reduced to background design elements). The single, tiny map has no identifying labels. Other new entries in the All About America series deal similarly with Explorers, Trappers, and Pioneers, A Nation of Immigrants and Stagecoaches and Railroads. Utilitarian, at best—but more likely to dim reader interest than kindle it. (index, timeline, resource lists) (Nonfiction. 8-10)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-7534-6670-4
Page Count: 32
Publisher: Kingfisher
Review Posted Online: Dec. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
A simplistic treatment for an audience likely unfamiliar with its subject.
Ehrlich renders an admiring portrait of Cather, focusing on the relationship between her writing and the places she lived and visited.
Willa and family followed her grandparents from Virginia to Nebraska in 1883. Willa was lonely, but she had a pony and freedom to roam. When her father traded farming for real estate, the family moved to Red Cloud. She read keenly, enjoying adult friends, who "were more interesting than children and...talked to Willa in a serious and cultured way." During her freshman year at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln, an essay’s publication changed Willa's path from doctor to writer. Cather worked at magazines in Pittsburgh and New York. The writer Sarah Orne Jewett urged her to focus on her own writing. Journeys to Europe, the American Southwest, back to Nebraska and Virginia—all resonated in her accomplished fiction. Ehrlich writes with little inflection, sometimes adopting Cather's viewpoint. The Civil War and slavery are briefly treated. (Cather's maternal grandparents were slaveholders.) Native Americans receive only incidental mentions: that Red Cloud is named for the Oglala Lakota chief and that, as children, Willa and her brothers had "imagined themselves in Indian country in the Southwest desert. What adventures they would have!" Minor's watercolor-and-gouache pictures depict bucolic prairie scenes and town and city life; meadowlarks appear frequently.
A simplistic treatment for an audience likely unfamiliar with its subject. (timeline, thumbnail biographies of American women writers of Cather's time, bibliography) (Biography. 7-10)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-689-86573-2
Page Count: 72
Publisher: Paula Wiseman/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 31, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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