Customer Reviews

Panama

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This "Houghton Mifflin Book for Children" is absolutely NOT a book for children. While I the subject matter is interesting, the subject matter is absolutely not appropriate for the intended audience and the lack of research for this book is just ... sad. These things bring down my rating for this book dramatically.

In the novel, A 16-year-old girl from Ohio moves to Panama with her family where her father is overseeing work on the creation of the Panama Canal. The girl is hoping for adventure and an authentic cultural experience, but, unfortunately, the area they live in is extremely Americanized. Since the girl had grown up next door to the Wright brothers and even helped them with their flying machines, she longs for sophisticated company like she's known back home. Her parents agree to allow her tag along with a census taker so that she can see the real lives of the canal workers. It's during her treks with the census taker that she meets Francisco whom she instantly falls in love with because he has a bookshelf full of sophisticated books and seems "aristocratic". Eventually, the girl instigates a relationship with Francisco (who's in his mid-20s) by bringing him more books to read.

I can relate to traveling to other countries with Americans who want only to mingle with Americans and eat American food and do American things rather than get to immerse themselves in another culture. I certainly can understand falling in love with a man who likes sophisticated books and wooing him with great books.

However, I want to know when underage sex with older men became an appropriate subject for a book labeled as a children's book? At the very least, it should be labeled as a young adult book. Frankly, there is more sex here in this book than in any adult book I've read all year.

Also, the book wasn't well researched. The very little Spanish the author attempts is rather bad. For example, she assumes that the infinitive form of the irregular verb "voy" is "vayer". The author also has the characters listening to a radio broadcast in Ohio 18 years before radio came to Ohio. Characters also receive telephoned news between Ohio and Panama in 1913, 2 years before the first transcontinental telephone call between New York and San Francisco was even made. This historic call (placed by Alexander Graham Bell himself) was actually made to mark the completion of the Panama Canal, but there certainly were no lines between the US and Panama yet and certainly not 2 years earlier. I'm not going to even bother looking up other historical inaccuracies.

Even without the historical inaccuracies and the age inappropriateness, I'd really only be able to give the book 3 stars. Luckily, I was able to read the book in an afternoon and didn't waste a whole week with it. So much for thinking I was going to learn a bit of history and culture within its pages.

I ordered this on the Vine program and I felt obliged to finish the book. It was more of a Harlequin Romance rather than a historical fiction piece, which is what I was expecting. The young protagonits in this book spends "erotic afternoons" with her older lover. She goes to a Brothel to get birth control!

The plot and writing were mediocre. I am glad I did not waste my money on this book.

It's been a long time since I've read something so derivative and formulaic. Throwing the girl-meets-man-gets sexually entangled...(you could provide the rest if you've watched movies or read a few books) into the historic period of the making of the Panama Canal doesn't make it any newer.

This is a short book from a children's publisher about an obsessed girl who isn't as interesting as she could be, although through heavy-handed and last-minute character development, she does somehow show she's progressed from the annoying, sexually-obsessed brat of the earlier pages into an amorphous wife of two in the future.

The flashback was typical; show something at the beginning from an "interesting" part of the book to hook the reader, then hastily bring the reader forward at the end to show a character progression. However, we're left to wonder if the character really grew at all, due to her segueing back into the role she would have taken if she'd never had her Panama experiences.

The history of the canal and the introduction of the Wright brothers as early neighbors are the best parts of this novel. That description is excellent. The author has a talent for the setting and description, but her storyline drags down the novel.

I kept wanting something new to happen, but I was never surprised by a thing in this novel. What's more, I wouldn't have been surprised as a teen, the market for this novel. I would have been just as irritated by the predictability. However, the history is good and the sex is good, which will probably keep people reading until the end.

Panama is labeled as a young adult novel. Essentially, this novel is a bodice ripper aimed at pre-teens and teens. It is highly inappropriate for the young adult, audience in my opinion. While the novel is not graphic, it is far too sensual for young girls.

Aside from the moral issues, the novel is just ok. The main character is a teenager from Dayton, Ohio who is transplanted by her parents to the Panama Canal Zone after her father accepts a position with the Panama Canal Commission to build the canal. While in Panama the narrator enters into an illicit, passionate affair with a Spanish exile working as a laborer. The narrator is completely selfish, scheming and spoiled. She is very unlikeable, reminding me of Amber St. Clair in Forever Amber.

However, unlike Forever Amber, Hiatt does not create a realistic sense of place, using anachronistic phrases like "Main Street U.S.A.," "breaking out," teenage angst, among others. Her Spanish is also awful - I hope some of the errors have been corrected in the final version of this book (I read a proof).

On the positive side, the story of the construction of the Canal was very interesting. However, I had a hard time getting past the anachronisms and the fact that this bodice-ripper was intended for young girls.

This book is basically trash. Only thing good about it is that it is short. As another reviewer has written it is just a bodice ripper... and I don't think that needs to be marketed for teenagers. The deception and the lies in the book were deeply disturbing. If you are going to write something like this for this age group then you need to be really clear about what type of book it is so that people know before they buy. I didn't like any of the characters in the book, thought the storyline was very weak, and with the book being completely devoid of any morality I wouldn't recommend it to anyone. Don't waste your money.

Panama is a very quick read. It has such potential!! I wanted to know more about these incredible surroundings the heroine found herself in. Descriptions and character development are both lacking. I didn't know why I should root for this girl. The author does a good job of expressiong the girls angst, but fails to develop the character further. The story just kind of fell flat at the end and was rather disappointing. It had such potential as a tale.

For parents: the book is about a sexual affair with a much older man. By the end, I had the message of the story: have as much wild fun as you can, because then you will grow up, live an average life, have kids and then spend your time looking back. What a negative message!

Unfortunately when this book was listed for 14 to 17 year olds I started to read it through the eyes of the middle school kids my wife teaches history to. My wife and I are avid readers of historic fiction and the idea of a child living in the canal zone during construction sounded like it would have great insights. However I was put off by what turned out to be kind of a smutty tale of a 17 year old girl hiding an affair with an older man. I'm not a book banning type, but the story line does not seem appropriate for 14 year olds, maybe it's target juvenile audience should be moved up a few years.

Otherwise the book did deliver on painting a picture of the construction conditions in the canal zone. There is a good sense of the complexity, difficulties, and grandeur of the project. The plight of the common workers is well handled and much of the historical background is credible and illustrative of the time. However, there were a few too many historical coincidences. The main character goes from living next door to the Wright brothers in Ohio, to the jungles of Panama where she meets the childhood friend of a Spanish prince. It borders on too much, and hurts the credibility a bit.

Otherwise the only thing that kind of stuck out was a shallowness in the main character. She rails against girls who care only for boys, then gets involved in a steamy relationship with an older man who pretty much tells her what her political views should be. Sadly this is probably pretty authentic, but it would have been nice to have a story where the main character forms her own convictions from her own observations and thoughts.

It is an OK book, but will not be added to our library. I do have to warn parents who are looking for a historic fiction books for kids on the lower end of its age range, it does have mature sexual themes.

Let me start by saying I'm not a prude; I'm an open-minded librarian. However, there were parts of this book that made me cringe. This book reads more like a cheap romance paperback than a young adult title. It starts slow and is hard to read even before the `romance' part of the book. The background stories were more interesting than the main story line.

I liked the author's portrayal of the main character's excitement and disappointment when she arrived in Panama. The author did not scrimp on details of the conditions of the workers and their living quarters, which was one of Panama's best parts. The turmoil that takes place in that setting is shown realistically through the eyes of a teen. Having the Wright brothers as neighbors was a nice twist. However, the flood and earthquake seemed thrown in to lengthen the book, unless the author was trying to include actual events that occurred in those areas at that time.

The plot jumped around quite a bit, especially toward the end. The book mentioned that one of the Wright brothers was dead while the main character is home, but doesn't mention how or why he died. As close as the main character was to the Wright brothers, there should have been some mention of the incident. The author did a good job of capturing the excitement of the people as the Canal was finally completed. I liked that natives were the first to use the canal. I also liked how she ended the book, with the entry in the Diary. I believe this is a 2 star book, at best. If it was marketed toward an older audience, I would probably give it a little better rating, but as is, I didn't care for this book very much at all. The author should write for some other audience instead of teens.

So I'm on the telephone with my friend who works in publishing and she says "You wouldn't believe what they're pushing to teenagers these days." I say "Like what for example?" She says, "Like sex for example. To early teens. Egging them on." "Oh come on," I say, "not the major publishers?" "Check it out" she says. She gives me a few upcoming titles. "Just don't tell them who told you."

Curious, I go to Amazon Vine and pull this book for review, which turns out to be - sure enough - a bodice-ripper for fifteen year-olds. All the classic supermarket ripper elements are there; the lovely but bored girl from Dayton, Ohio who finds herself in exotic Panama during the canal building years of the early 20th century, the handsome mysterious foreign man, disguised as a manual laborer to cover his exile from his native Europe due to radical political intrigues against his childhood playmate, the King of Spain. The sultry tropical air. The bodice.

All this effectively gets your typical teen girl's fantasy life whirring and clicking and gives her plenty of technical guidance too. How to sneak around and deceive your straightlaced Midwestern parents while you slide off to meet Federico. What to do about birth control once you start the sex part (ask the madame of the local brothel for a folk contraceptive of course - she will even hint you could be one of her girls - which should just thrill your parents).

The interesting thing here is that a) Federico is about twice the age of our 16 year old heroine, and b) the book is a product of the CHILDREN'S Book Group of Houghton Mifflin. I guess that means "marketed to children" rather than "advisable for children." I wonder if they have other titles for kids which promote smoking cigarettes - hey, it's legal, kids think it's cool, why not??

Whatever. Ms. Hiatt is not without talent, although this book is more about dollar signs than high art. Her depiction of Federico (courtly but emotionally uninvolved as he sexually exploits the young girl) is flat but somewhat believable. The girl herself is less believable - never does she seem fifteenish - but her goofy disjointed inner dialogs have some charm. The author has done a certain amount of homework about the Panama Canal construction and the Wright brothers but did not bother to verify historical accuracy in other ways. In 1903 in Dayton, the girl's father turns on the radio - but (as can be learned from a few minutes on Wikipedia), broadcast radio did not come to Ohio until 1921. Whoops. In 1913, her family in Panama learns of a flood back home by telephone - but in reality the news would have come by telegraph as there was certainly no telephone service from the US to Panama in 1913 or even in 1933. Oh who cares, why be so picky - at least she didn't give them cell phones and iPods.

The writer Shelby Hiatt is a former soap opera actress and wannabe screenwriter who is off on a new career as commercial novelist. She's onto something here and if this one sells, Houghton Mifflin could develop a whole Jailbait Series! With booksignings in middle school cafeterias ... attended by a Federico lookalike.. "Kiss Me, I'm Jailbait" T-shirts ...

This book held such promise, and I was so looking forward to reading it. In the end, though, I would not recommend this to teen readers. Maybe it would have worked better as an adult book, with the narrator thinking back to her teen years?

That said, a 15-year-old girl from Ohio moves with her family to Panama because her dad is overseeing the work on the building of the canal. Coming from a sense of suburbia, she is young and hoping for an adventure and authentic cultural experiences, but instead we never get to read about said experiences because she sees a man in his mid-20s with a bookshelf full of books and we make the leap of faith that he is sophisticated.

For a girl looking for authentic experiences, the bookshelf (and its owner) reminds her of the adventurers she knew back home (the Wright Brothers, of all people). She starts a relationship with Francisco by bringing him more books. In turn, the education he gives her is inappropriate and kind of creepy. This did not make me feel like a carefree teenager with wild abandon on my mind, and I don't think it strikes a chord with new love or first love.

The majority of the book was about their love affair...and I didn't feel it was appropriate for the age it was intended.

There was some things that made me wonder about the accuracy of the historical data, especially pertaining to the phone lines and communication between Panama and the US.

Again, this book may have had more strength had it been written for the adult market, with the narrator thinking back to her "firsts."