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
Multiple compelling Depression-era histories converge in Bruchac's latest, about a boy attending a government boarding school for Native Americans in 1932. Cal enjoys being a hobo with Pop, riding the rails and doing honest work. But then Pop gives Cal two pieces of life-changing news. The first is that Pop, who Cal always thought was white, is a Creek Indian. Second, Pop is going to D.C. to protest with other WWI veterans for their bonus payments. While Pop is gone, Cal will attend the Challagi Indian Boarding School, where Pop went as a boy. Challagi is a bleak and often brutal place, but, while there, Cal befriends other Native boys from various tribes for the first time. Pop's recollections of the abuses he witnessed at Challagi are so harsh that readers might initially wonder why he sends his son there a question Bruchac also thoughtfully addresses in the afterword. But the students' utter subversion of Challagi's mission to sever their ties with Indian culture soon becomes apparent, as does Cal's powerful, growing understanding of his identity.--Mariko Turk Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Horn Book Review
Abenaki author and storyteller Bruchac (Code Talkers; Talking Leaves, rev. 7/16) crafts an emotional and informative work of historical fiction about family and identity. Set in 1932, the novel finds young Cal Black, who is half Creek but has believed he was white his entire life, and his father riding the railroad lines of Depression-era America as hoboes in search of work. Cal, who experiences unexplained premonitions, enjoys their nomadic life, but when his father, a WWI veteran, feels compelled to join the Bonus Army march in Washington, DC, he tells Cal about their true heritage and enrolls him in an Indian boarding school in Oklahomathe same one he attended as a young man. Cal is forced to confront this heretofore-unknown part of his heritage while adjusting to life at a school designed to kill the Indian within him, even if he doesnt know exactly what it means to be Creek in the first place. The first-person narrative rings true, and Cals visions work both to heighten the tension and to propel the story forward. The fictional Challagi School Cal attends stands in for the actual Indian boarding schools of the era and gives readers a look into the day-to-day life of a student at one of these institutions. The afterword provides readers more information on the history of federal Indian boarding schools, as well as further background on the Great Depression. A tautly paced and compelling story of self-discovery, family, belonging, and friendship. eric carpenter (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
Twelve-year-old Cal Blackbird trades the freedom of hobo living with his father, a World War I vet, for the regimented world of Challagi Indian Boarding School.Set in spring and summer of 1932 Depression-era America, Bruchac's (Abenaki) historical novel sees narrator Cal and his father riding the rails, eking out a meager and honest life as inseparable "knights of the road." But when Pop reads news about fellow veterans gathering in Washington, D.C., to demand payment of promised bonuses, he decides to "join [his] brother soldiers." To keep Cal safe while away, Pop tells him about their Creek heritage and enrolls him at Challagi. Even though he's only "half Creek" and has been raised white, Cal easily makes friends there with a gang of Creek boys and learns more about his language and culture in the process. Though the book is largely educational, Creek readers may notice the language discrepancy when their word for "African-American" is twice used to label a light-skinned Creek boy. Additionally, Cal's articulation of whiteness sounds more like a 21st-century adult's then a Depression-era boy's. More broadly, readers accustomed to encountering characters who struggle along their journeys may find many of the story's conflicts resolved without significant tension and absent the resonant moments that the subject matter rightly deserves.A lesser-known aspect of Native American history that promises the excitement of riding the rails yet delivers a handcar version of the boarding school experience. (list of characters, afterword) (Historical fiction. 10-14) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
