Amazon.com Review
Each of the six stories in Chaim Potok's lovely collection is titled simply with the name of the main character, reflecting the essence of these quiet selections--intense, exquisitely drawn portraits of the ordinary lives of young people. In "Zebra" a boy, with the help of a mysterious, unconventional art teacher, begins to regain the use of his crushed hand--and in the process heals a bit of his injured spirit. Secrets abound in "B.B.," where a young girl whose baby brother has died must cope with discovering the hidden realities about her family that are "too much of a secret for me to be carrying alone." "Nava" describes how a young woman handles a bully, calling upon the strength inspired by the words of a Native American family friend to confront a violent drug dealer.
The issues faced by these young adults--trust, divorce, grief, hope, peer and family dynamics--are common coming-of-age milestones. But what makes Potok's powerful work shine is that he clearly holds respect for the intelligence and intuition of young people, allowing them to decipher their own truths--refraining from preaching or hammering a point home. Potok, author of The Chosen, published several of these stories previously in adult publications. Nevertheless, these voices never sound dubiously mature for their teen years; they speak the straightforward, often strikingly insightful language of youth. As one young character notes, "I think losing your soul is when you can't tell a story about something that has happened to you." Indeed. Judging by the quality and craftsmanship of these tales, it's obvious that Potok is brimming with soul. (Ages 12 and older). --Brangien Davis
From Publishers Weekly
Potok (The Chosen) turns out an uneven collection of six stories, each featuring a teenager in transition. Their predicaments, for the most part, are inventive and resonant: B.B.'s mother is at the hospital in labor when B.B.'s father leaves the cataclysmic message that he is walking out; Nava learns from her Vietnam-vet dad how to defend herself against a particularly aggressive drug pusher; Isabel's newly widowed mother meets and marries a widower with a daughter near Isabel's age. The title story, which opens the book, is the exception: predictable and flimsily peopled, it describes a gravely injured boy's psychic healing through an art class. The other entries allow for more ambiguity, leaving small lacunae in the narratives for intelligent readers to fill in. The characterizations, unfortunately, tend to be incomplete or unconvincing. Nava, for example, uses expressions like "about the time... my menstrual blood began to flow"; B.B.'s gender is kept a secret from the reader; drummer Moon Vinten, a rebellious 13-year-old who dyes his ponytail blue, tacks up Beatles photos in his bedroom. Readers who don't mind the somewhat wooden nature of the protagonists will probably enjoy the adult feel of Potok's suggestive silences. Ages 11-16.
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