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"It is a poor life in which there is no fear," Dakar's father likes to remind his two daughters. Before 12-year-old Dakar and her family moved to North Dakota from Kenya, her fears took the shape of charging elephants, muggings, blind beggars, bombings, and deadly cholera. In the American Midwest, she is leery of telephones, the banister in her unfamiliar two-story house, and most of all, that her older sister, Jakarta, who decided to stay back in Kenya may not be safe.

Jane Kurtz's delightful, original novel stars worrywart Dakar, a very human, very well-read, very bright girl with a richly textured imagination and fascinating fresh perspectives on Midwestern life. Dakar has reason to be a worrywart. Her mother slips into occasional periods of depression (the "hoodies" get her), and her father is perpetually preoccupied with global disease control, a job that keeps his mind far from the family, and the family on the run.

Dakar is a natural storyteller, and her new sixth-grade schoolmate Melanie's eyes grow wide with her tales of Africa. Readers, too, will revel in her imaginative landscape, rich with historical and biblical allusions she memorized in an Ethiopian boarding school, and "mysterious and unexplained things" like the Ark of the Covenant, the pyramids, and that her mom heard her grandmother's voice after she had passed away. Dakar's growing friendship with Melanie is a pleasure to behold--Melanie teaches her how to say "Help me. I'm a buttery potato on fire" in sign language, and Dakar spins tales of a continent far away. They are a fine pair, sharing secrets and dreams, even though the most exotic thing Melanie owns is a bracelet from the Wisconsin Dells, and, as she says, "The most exciting thing I've done until now was wearing socks that don't match."

Underlying all her new-kid-on-the-continent experiences is Dakar's fierce missing of Jakarta, her beautiful, smart, athletic sister. But when Jakarta is forced to return home from Africa for her own safety, the reunion is not the joyful one Dakar had anticipated. Jakarta and her father go head to head, and their mother leaves the family to help her mother's sister when she breaks her leg. When a terrible earthquake in Guatemala causes their father to leave, too, the girls are abandoned with only a credit card and the directive to be resourceful. In this fine novel, Dakar comes into her own. She learns, along with readers, that you shouldn't "get so caught up in safe that you forget to be fully alive" and that "courage and kindness and friendship and truth sent magic splinters into the universe." Heartily recommended. (Ages 10 and older) --Karin Snelson

From Publishers Weekly
Ambitious and complex, Kurtz's (Faraway Home) novel doesn't ultimately succeed, but offers a heady blend of universally relevant insight and an appreciation of the exotic. Raised in Africa, 12-year-old Dakar comes "home" with her parents to spend a year or two in North Dakota. She misses her older sister, Jakarta, who has insisted on staying behind at boarding school, and who has always been the leader. Her fears about her new environment are made all the more painful by her father's disdain for fear not even an elephant attack scares him. Bookish in a way entirely credible for a shy, expatriate child, Dakar thinks about literary and biblical characters and wishes she, too, could fashion her own quest. "What would Odysseus do?" she asks herself at one point. Kurtz captivates when describing Africa, be it the grace of the wilderness or the chaos of "Nairobbery," as Dakar calls it, and she astutely conjures adolescent dialogue and thoughts. But she overloads her plot. Jakarta is forced to join the family after her school is bombed; shortly after her return, their mom goes off to nurse a long-lost aunt (who doesn't have a telephone); and, without consulting his still-absent wife, their father rushes off to Guatemala to work with earthquake victims (no phones there, either), leaving his daughters alone for weeks. Multiple subplots involve a girls' basketball team, a painful family secret and a cook at Dakar's school who talks in aphorisms. Even with its solid beginning, the novel simply cannot sustain so much activity. Ages 10-up.

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Dakar stood at the top of the stairs and held her breath. Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
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