Customer Reviews

Miranda's Last Stand (Harper Trophy)

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3 star:		(1)
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By page 3 of this wise, honorable and lovely book, Great Lakes Book Award winner Gloria Whelan gives us both a serious problem and a mystery. We are hooked. Miranda is a 10-year-old whose artist mother is the widow of a cavalryman killed at Little Big Horn. Narrator of what happens before and afer her nearly penniless mother signs on as backdrop painter for Buffalo Bill's touring Wild West Show, she is entirely believable. The sometimes rebelious conclusions she draws along her story's way are never wise beyond her years. Her speech is that of an artist's daughter. ["There was a flourish in all (Wild Bill Cody) did, like the curlicues people put in their writing." The eyes of the Sioux girl who befriends her on Cody's show "were the color of brown stones shining in water." Frost leaves flowers looking like wet mops.] Readers Miranda's age will like her. MIRANDA'S LAST STAND begins with a brilliantly vivid and succinct presentation of the whites' point of view after the Battle of Little Big Horn. Then with the dry perception, lively but careful historical detail, and beautiful but never intrusive lyric passages that one can expect from Gloria Whelan, we are subtly led toward another point of view--that of Sitting Bull's Sioux. Exploring her grandparents' Dakota Territory farm, Miranda comments about the creatures whose nests and burrows she comes upon, "Everywhere I looked, something was there before us." Then she finds an arrowhead. Miranda travels just as far in her mind as in the Company of Wild Bill Cody, and both journeys are conveyed by Gloria Whelan as smoothly as if she had seen and done everything she writes about. In a clear but unforced way, she makes the reader see the problems, moral and physical, of young people like Miranda and her new friend Quick Fox, whose people want the same space and haven't found a way to share it--problems Miranda's readers face today.

Miranda was just two when her papa died at the Battle of Little Bighorn, eight years ago. Her mama has hated Indians ever since, and so has Miranda. When they join the Wild West Show, Miranda's views change. But will her mother's ever? This was a very good book.

I had to read this book for my history class and it wasn't the best. The starting is really slow and boring, but it gets better around the middle. The book is not too good, but its not horrible. Her dad died at about age 2 and she and her mother have hated the indians. Then they are in the Wild West Show with indians and their fathers killer. Life is hard for them.