Review by New York Times Review
IN THE PAST FEW YEARS, children's literature has become more committed to diversity, and lately we're seeing more "Own Voices" books, whose authors share their protagonists' marginalized identity. The best of this season's historical fiction demonstrates why all kinds of diversity are important, with writers from varied backgrounds using settings we've seen before - a Native American boarding school, a World War II internment camp in Texas, Okinawa, Chicago during the Great Migration - to tell stories that are nuanced, honest and new. THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT created Indian boarding schools in the late 19 th century to control Native Americans and eradicate their culture. Run on military lines with draconian rules and brutal punishments, they're a stain on our national history - yet some Native American parents, given the complexity of their circumstances, willingly and with full understanding chose to place their own children there. That situation is sensitively dramatized in TWO ROADS (Dial, 320 pp., $16.99; ages io to 14), by the celebrated Abenaki author Joseph Bruchac. In 1932 12-year-old Cal Black and his father live as knights of the road, hobos following an ethical code. Cal's father served honorably in the Great War, but lost the family farm to foreclosure two years ago, just after Cal's mother died. Since then they've ridden the rails in search of better prospects they never find. Cal is often hungry and sometimes scared: Their black hair and tan skin can make him and his father targets in the rural South. But Cal adores his father and is proud of the way they help each other. Then war veterans decide to camp around Washington in pursuit of their wartime bonuses. Cal's father, fearing the situation won't be safe for Cal, drops two bombshells: First, he and Cal are not white. They're Creek Indians. Second, he wants Cal to go to Challagi, the Indian boarding school in Oklahoma that he himself ran away from three times. While the education and the living conditions will be subpar, they're better than what Cal's getting now - and if his father can get his bonus they could go back to having a permanent home. At Challagi, the days of draconian punishments are past, but still far more students run away than graduate. It's not an easy place - but it gives Cal a community, and a tribal identity he didn't realize he was lacking. He joins a band of boys, begins to learn to speak Creek and takes part in stomp dances at night in the woods. Cal's cleareyed first-person narration drives the novel. Meticulously honest, generous, autonomous and true, he sees things for what they are rather than what he'd like them to be. The result is one of Bruchac's best books. Cal comes to see himself as a gentleman of two roads: one he travels with his father, and the other, a Creek road, that he negotiates himself. A detailed afterword explains sources for the story. THE WAR OUTSIDE (Little, Brown, 318 pp., $17.99; ages 12 and up), by Monica Hesse ("The Girl in the Blue Coat"), also takes a setting we think we understand and shifts it in an important way. Seventeen-year-old Haruko is a nisei, an American-born child of Japanese immigrants. In 1944, along with her younger sister and her mother, she travels from Denver to Texas, to join her father in a World War II family internment camp called Crystal City. Unlike the camps where West Coast Japanese-Americans were imprisoned en masse, Crystal City houses enemy aliens suspected of actually spying - and not just Japanese. Germans live in Crystal City, too. On her first day of high school in the camp, Haruko meets Margot, a first-generation GermanAmerican teenager whose family farmed in Iowa. Margot's father attended a Nazi meeting there. Margot hates Hitler but she's not sure what her increasingly unstable father actually believes. Meanwhile Haruko doesn't know why her father was sent to the camp, but she knows he's hiding something from her. Her brother, Ken, is fighting in the United States Army. Has her father somehow endangered him? Crystal City is divided, literally and metaphorically - Japanese on one side of the camp, Germans on the other. Neither side trusts the other; neither side is entirely trustworthy. Because the government considers the families to be prisoners of war, who might be repatriated to their birth countries and complain about their treatment, the facility is reasonably comfortable, with a well-appointed school and a vast community swimming pool. But it's still a prison, and both girls feel changed by their confinement. Haruko and Margot quickly forge an intense, wholly believable, somewhat erotic secret relationship. As the war careens to an end, tensions in the camp lead to violence. One of the girls is forced to betray the other. It's a tightly plotted exploration of the consequences of fear. ALAN GRATZ, the author of the best-selling "Refugee," couldn't write a slow-paced book even if he were paid by the word. In GRENADE (Scholastic, 270 pp., $17.99; ages 9 to 12 ), he takes on the nearly three-month battle of Okinawa through the eyes of two combatants: Ray, a young man on his first tour of duty in the Marines, and Hideki, a 14-year-old schoolboy who is granted early graduation the day the Americans land. He also receives two grenades: one to kill the enemy and one to kill himself. Okinawa had been under Japanese control for over 300 years, but Okinawans never really assimilated, retaining their own language and culture. The higher-ups within the Japanese Army have all removed to the mainland. Those soldiers left on Okinawa are charged with fighting to the last man. Hideki's family lives under the shadow of an ancestor's cowardice, so he's determined to prove himself a hero, until his dying father charges him with finding his sister and staying alive. For a middle school novel this has a high body count. War is relentless; characters we care about die. Gratz is careful not to describe the bloodshed in too much detail, but it still might be a bit much for some readers. The central truth, hard won and believable, is that sometimes it takes greater courage not to fight. Hideki learns to see valor on both sides, to understand that war turns people into monsters, but that after the battle the monsters can become people again. FINDING LANGSTON (Holiday House, 112 pp., $17.99; ages 9 to 13), the first middle grade novel by the picture book writer Lesa Cline-Ransome ("Before She Was Harriet"), takes us into the years just after World War II. When 11-year-old Langston's mother died, his father sold what little they had and moved himself and Langston from Alabama to a black neighborhood in Chicago called Bronzeville. Langston is lonely and grieving. So far none of Chicago's supposed benefits have materialized: His father works long hours but can't afford to replace Langston's worn boots or country overalls. Their apartment is bleak and empty. They seem to have buried all warmth and comfort with Mama. Then, by accident, Langston happens upon the George Cleveland Hall Library. In Alabama, libraries were for whites only. This library, Langston learns, is for any resident of Chicago - and its founder, namesake and head librarian are all black. Langston discovers black writers - among them, a poet with whom he shares a name. Is that an accident? Or did Mama somehow know this poetry? There aren't any explosions in this spare story. Nor is there a happy ending. Instead, Langston discovers something more enduring: solace. To quote Langston Hughes: "My black one / Thou are not beautiful / Yet thou hast / A loveliness / Surpassing beauty." It's a fine epitaph for all of these fine books. KIMBERLY BRUBAKER BRADLEY IS the author of the Newbery Honor-winning "The War That Saved My Life" and its sequel, "The War I Finally Won."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Langston wishes he was back in Alabama. The 11-year-old's mother was barely dead and buried before his father moved them to Chicago, where, in 1946, a man can provide for his family without always scraping and bowing. But to Langston, Chicago is loneliness and lacking no friends, family, or good food, just his dad's bad cooking. Three bullies make life even harder. Then he discovers something that amazes him: a public library, and it's not just for whites like the one back home. This branch library not only welcomes African Americans, it celebrates successful black men and women, especially writers. The library becomes Langston's everything his space away from his tiny apartment, his refuge from the bullies, the expansion of his world through books. It is also the place where he finds his namesake, Langston Hughes, and begins to find himself. Cline-Ransome, lauded for her picture books, including Booklist's 2017 Top of the List title Before She Was Harriet, proves herself an adept novelist, one with keen insight into the human condition. Every character, child and adult, is layered, a feat made more remarkable by the fact that the writing is spare. Emotions and relationships are teased out through quiet details and glimmers of understanding, but the impact on the reader could not be more powerful. A memorable debut novel.--Cooper, Ilene Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 2-5-It's 1946 and 11-year-old Langston, named after Langston Hughes, has just moved from Alabama to Chicago with his father following the death of his mother. Langston feels isolated and is bullied at school, and every day he misses Alabama: the dirt roads, his Grandma and her cooking, and the sound of Mama's voice. When Langston accidentally stumbles into the public library to ask for directions, he realizes that, unlike in Alabama, black people are allowed in the library, and portraits of esteemed black literary figures hang on the walls. Langston secretly visits the library daily and is pulled into the poetry of Langston Hughes, discovering his namesake. As the bullying at school intensifies and tragedy strikes his family, Langston finds solace with his neighbor, Miss Fulton, who reads Hughes's poetry out loud to him in the evenings. Cline-Ransome presents a stunning story of a boy during the Great Migration who finds his longing for the South and his father's fondness for the blues reflected in Hughes's poetry. Langston's observations about the world are astute, whether it's his realization of the burdens his father carries or how men on the street look at women. Readers who have struggled with grief, identity, racism, bullying, or loneliness will find their experiences reflected in this beautifully written novel, which has a satisfying, but not-too-tidy ending. VERDICT Cline-Ransome's novel is an engaging, quick, and relatable read that skillfully incorporates themes of race, class, post-war American life in the North and South, and a bit of Langston Hughes' poetry. This is a story that will stay with readers long after they've finished it. A first purchase for all libraries.-Liz Anderson, DC Public Library © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
When Langstons mother dies, his father relocates the two of them from rural Alabama to the Bronzeville neighborhood of Chicago, where they live in a cramped apartment, barely communicate with each other, and stifle their grief. Its the 1940s; his father works long hours at a paper plant, and school is a dreadful place where Langston is bullied for being a country boy. Then Langston discovers the George Cleveland Hall Branch of the Chicago Public Library, where he finds the poetry of Langston Hughes. Struck by their shared name, Langston checks out the books and hides them from kids at school and his father, reading them in brief snatches when nobody is around. Is there a connection between himself and Langston Hughes? Reading poetry becomes Langstons way to keep his mothers memory alive, find solace from grief, and make a friend. Written in short chapters, this crisply paced book is full of historical details of the Great Migration and the role a historic branch library played in preserving African American literary culture. The library and Langston Hughes bout the only thing that kept me going without my mama, Langston says, a sentiment that may resonate with any child who has experienced grief or loneliness, or has had a strong connection to literature. julie hakim azzam (c) Copyright 2018. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A Great Migration novella with a vivid, believable protagonist.When Langston's mother dies in 1946, his father feels that Alabama has nothing left for him and moves himself and Langston to Chicago, where Negroes could make a living wage and avoid the severe discrimination so prevalent in the South. A sensitive boy who loved his mother deeply, Langston has spent so little time with his father that he doesn't really know him. When he becomes the target of schoolyard bullies who call him "country boy," his loneliness sends him to the George Cleveland Hall branch of the Chicago Public Library, where he learns that African-Americans are welcome, which is different from Alabama. A kind librarian helps him find booksincluding poetry by Langston Hughes, for whom she assumes he has been named. From snooping into letters his dad has saved, he realizes that his mother loved the poetry of Langston Hughes, which inspires him to read everything Hughes has written. Cline-Ransome creates a poignant, bittersweet story of a young black boy who comes to accept his new home while gaining newfound knowledge of the African-American literary tradition. Langston's heartfelt, present-tense narration, which assumes a black default, gathers readers so close they'll be sad to see his story conclude.A fascinating work of historical fiction that showcases a well-developed, likable protagonist and presents Cline-Ransome at her best. (Historical fiction. 9-13) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
