Forty years ago Ron Kovic’s memoir, Born on the Fourth of July, was released and soon sold over one million copies. The movie version, co-written with Oliver Stone and starring Tom Cruise as Kovic, was the 1989 Academy Award-winning film.…
Category: War
Review: Salt To The Sea by Ruta Sepetys
Last month I reviewed the middle grade novel Pax by Sara Pennypacker. This month I am reviewing a young adult novel that also explores the effects of war on our world. While Pax explores these effects in a near future,…
Amina – a Story Through the Eyes of a Somali Girl
I found Amina in the collection of an American library in a city that’s now home to one of the largest communities of Somali-Americans, Lewiston, Maine. The Somali girls of Lewiston and of every city and town will find an…
Review: Pax by Sara Pennypacker
The Fox felt the car slow before the boy did, as he felt everything first. So begins Sara Pennypacker’s middle grade novel Pax (Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins, February 2016), a book about many things, including the effects of war. Not some…
Complicated Family Histories: A Review of Enchanted Air
Margarita Engle’s parents met in 1947, when her father, an artist from the U.S., visited the Museo Romántico in Trinidad de Cuba, her mother’s hometown; “it was love at first sight.” Although they didn’t speak each other’s language, he proposed…
Child Soldier
There is an ironic page in Child Soldier showing the narrator/protagonist, Michel Chikwanine, riding his Canadian school bus, living in two worlds at one time. The students around him are complaining about things privileged Western kids complain about: parents, phones,…
Review: Listen, Slowly by Thanhhà Lai
With her first novel for young readers (Inside Out and Back Again, HarperCollins 2011), Thanhhà Lai captured in verse one child’s experience adjusting to life in Alabama after leaving Vietnam. In Listen, Slowly, Lai explores the experience of Mai (Mia at…
Seng Ty’s Years of Zero: Coming of Age under the Khmer Rouge
In 1975, when Seng Ty was six years old, Khmer Rouge soldiers forced Cambodians living in the capital city, Phnon Penh, to abandon their homes and begin a march to the countryside, and, for many, to their deaths. Ty has…
On Two Feet and Wings: alone, a small boy escapes war in Iran
On this November day, U.S. students seek to make sense of complicated negotiations with Iranian officials to limit the country’s nuclear capability. A new book takes young readers to an earlier Iran and adds layers of meaning to Iran in…
A Cat’s View of Palestine: Deborah Ellis does it again
You know, if somebody just told me the premise of this book (“American girl dies suddenly and finds herself reincarnated, with all her memories intact, as a cat living in Palestine”) I would have thought, That is too cheesy for…