Crescent Moon [Hardcover]

Alden R. Carter (Author)

Book Description

Age Level: 10 and up | Grade Level: 5 and up

Living in the logging area of northern Wisconsin during the early 1900s, twelve-year-old Jeremy helps his uncle carve a statue of a Chippewa maiden as a tribute to the vanishing culture of her people.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set in early-20th-century Wisconsin, Carter's (Up Country) disjointed novel establishes 12-year-old Jeremy as a witness to the waning of a way of life. The depletion of the logging supply, the dwindling of the Chippewa Indian population and the fading of Uncle Mac's woodcarving craft create an atmosphere of loss. Jeremy's growing interest in Uncle Mac's carving of a wooden Chippewa maiden serves as a not-altogether-convincing symbol for his relationship to the changing times. Unfortunately, as the novel gets underway, flat characterizations and Jeremy's passive point of view distance readers from the darker emotional undercurrents. Often the plot advances through didactic and contrived dialogue. The most affecting narrative thread concerns Jeremy's twin friends, Eddie and Willie, who must work in the mills after their hard-drinking father is injured; however, readers may balk when Jeremy's do-gooder father refuses to help the twins. The pacing picks up midway, when Jeremy masquerades as a wealthy half-wit to enable union organizers to sneak on a logging train bound for healthy forests. Those who contunue through the sluggish beginning will be rewarded with a climactic conclusion and tidy epilogue. Ages 12-up. (Dec.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From School Library Journal

Grade 5-8-With an unusual richness of detail and character, this novel set in Eau Claire, WI, at the end of the lumbering era grips readers with its excitement and suspense. Jeremy, 13, is the son of a shopkeeper and the great-nephew of a wood-carver. Aware that his carving of a cigar-store Indian has offended Nathan Two-Horse, Uncle Mac decides to make amends by creating a carving of an Indian maiden from one of the last pine logs to come down the river. He asks Two-Horse's niece to pose, understanding that he will not be permitted to use her face. As Jeremy and his buddies deal with daily life in a mill town, readers learn about the changes facing the community as the union organizers strive to improve working conditions. Jeremy finds ways to help the organizers and involves himself in the carving of the magnificent figure, which comes to symbolize an attempt to balance some of the past injustices. Both threads come together in a rip-roaring finish where good and evil clash, with violent death as the result. Carter does a fine job of creating lifelike characters and a plot that allows historical detail and events to unfold without taking over. It is Jeremy's story and growth that holds readers. The natural color and detail of the past flow through, shaping and enriching the narrative. This is good historical fiction, with issues of justice, racism, and the environment woven into the action-packed plot.
Carol A. Edwards, Sonoma County Library, Santa Rosa, CA
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 10 and up
  
• Hardcover: 208 pages
• Publisher: Holiday House; 1st edition (February 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 082341521X
• ISBN-13: 978-0823415212
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,458,612 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Alden Carter's thirty-year career includes publication of novels for young adults and adults, nonfiction books on a wide range of topics, and picture books for and about special needs children. Among numerous awards, his novels have been named six times to the American Library Association's list of Best Books of the Year. His adult novel of the Civil War, Bright Starry Banner, was awarded the prestigious John Esten Cooke Fiction Award. A popular speaker, he has given over 600 presentations in schools and at conferences for writers and educators. A former teacher and naval officer, he lives in Marshfield, Wisconsin, with his wife, Carol. They have two adult children: Brian, an architect, and Siri, a college student.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2.0 out of 5 stars Sanitized version of reality, February 9, 2007

By 

A. Luciano (Lowell, MA United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Crescent Moon (Hardcover)

Jeremy is thirteen years old, living in the early 1900s. He lives close to a river where loggers float newly felled pine logs to be cut in the town's sawmills. The loggers have destroyed the pine forest, though, and this year is to be the last time logs will travel Jeremy's river. Jeremy's uncle is a woodcarver who has decided to memorialize the last logging run with a special carving--a beautiful life-sized Indian maiden. He will collaborate with a member of the Chippewa tribe, who live outside of town.

This is destined to be a summer of changes for Jeremy. He isn't sure at first what to think of the Indians, but he finds himself falling for the young woman who models for his uncle's statue. Jeremy will be going back to school in the fall, but two of his best friends will have to go to work in a mill, doing manual labor, when their father is disabled in a terrible accident. There is rumbling throughout the logging community of workers unionizing, but those who dare to try to recruit members are targeted and beaten. Everything is changing, and Jeremy spends the summer trying to work out his place in the world.

The history in this book and the sad story of a town moving toward becoming obsolete is interesting. However, I felt as though the relationships in this story were far too sanitized to be believable. Whites were living in harmony with blacks and Indians, and life was very easy for almost everyone in this book..

5.0 out of 5 stars Really Memorable, February 4, 2005

By 

Reader from Rice Lake (Rice Lake, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Crescent Moon (Hardcover)

This book is a page-turner, with several plot threads that paint a complete picture of life in a logging community at the end of an era. Carter's characters are well-drawn and believable, memorable months after reading the book. The book's challenges of everyday life have ties to contemporary life with themes of cultures clashing, labor struggles, gangs, and the desperation of poverty. It's a gripping book this reader will long remember.

5.0 out of 5 stars Step into history, July 6, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Crescent Moon (Hardcover)

In this excellent novel for young teenagers, Carter opens up aworld almost totally foreign to contemporary Americans, even though itis less than a century removed from us. Jeremy, his widowed father, and his father's uncle, along with all their neighbors in the north woods, are witnessing the end of a way of life-- the last cutting of one of the great forests of the northern Midwest and thus the last great logroll down the river to the mills-- along with the growth of a newer aspect of factory and working class life, the spread of the unions. Though Jeremy's father is a sales representative, he sympathizes with the needs and concerns of the lumberjacks and mill-workers, as does his uncle, whose way of life is also dying: he carves wooden displays for shopkeepers-- a wooden hat for a haberdasher, and so forth-- but knows that soon all those shopkeepers will be using words and not images to convey their messages. So Uncle Mac, with the help of two native Americans, turns his hand to one last great carving-- a full-body "Indian" maiden-- as a sort of apology for the cigar store Indians that demeaned native Americans. Jeremy is the focal point around which Carter casts these various themes, the maturing and sensitive youth who is ready to have his ideas of the world expanded.