Review: Hana’s Suitcase

Title:  Hana’s Suitcase

Author:  Karen Levine

Publisher:  Albert Whitman and Company

Genre:  History/Non-Fiction

            This book is about two stories:  a Jewish girl named Hana who gets caught right in the middle of the holocaust and a woman named Fumiko Ishioka half a world away on an inspiring journey to find the identity of a girl named Hana Brady. This book was on my reading list for school and it pairs well with The Berlin Boxing Club because Karl (from The Berlin Boxing Club) and Hana are both kids that get caught in the tremor of the holocaust, but both in different ways.

Fumiko Ishioka is a Japanese woman on a mission to teach children about the tragedy of the holocaust. She works for the Tokyo Holocaust Research and Education Center, which, of course, is located in Tokyo. She teaches kids of today mainly about kids of then, what their lives were like, what the restrictions put into action by the Nazis were, etc. One day, by request, she gets a package in the mail of things that might help her teach the kids at her facility. They include a sock, a shoe, a can of Zyklon-B poisonous gas, and a suitcase, labeled “Hana Brady, Waisenkind (the German word for orphan)”. She wants to figure out who Hana was, what her life was like, and generally, her story. So she searches literally the globe in a determined hunt for clues that might help her. She faces many seemingly dead ends, but doesn’t give up.

Hana’s story is a deeply sorrowful one, but a very humbling one at least. It made me appreciate the life that I had, which was like that of a millionaire compared to hers. She had a brother named George who was three years younger than her, a mother with a booming laugh, and a caring father. First their (Hana’s and George’s) parents get separated from their household, then the children are taken up by their aunt and uncle, then are separated from their guardians, then each other. Along the way are many losses of lives of both friends and family.

The story of Hana comes to a terrible end, but Fumiko Ishioka’s search did not go in vain. She finds a relative who teaches her students about the terrible seven-year period and about personal accounts as well. In fact, the story of Hana herself was told by her relative, and then written down by Karen Levine. Many people may think that authors barely even have to think to write a non-fiction or history book. I mean, it’s already happened, right? It can’t be that hard. WRONG!! This book was clearly very hard to write, but in a way that’s hard to explain. The whole setup is absolutely perfect. The two stories go back and forth in between chapters. Karen Levine also does a very good job of writing it, in a way that seems very real. Again, it’s hard to explain. I would recommend this book to anyone ages thirteen and up.

Posted by: Fred Reads

Review: The Phantom Tollbooth

Title: The Phantom Tollbooth

Author:  Norton Juster

Illustrator:  Jules Feiffer

Publisher:  Yearling

Genre:  Children’s fiction

“There was once a boy named Milo who didn’t know what to do with himself – not just sometimes, but always.”

So imagine Milo’s surprise as one day a large box, bigger than any box he’s ever seen – and then learns that inside is an instruction manual and parts to make a tollbooth. And not just any tollbooth – a supposed “phantom” tollbooth that supposedly leads to “mysterious lands”. And THEN finds out that what the box says is true! Milo is a bored boy who doesn’t know what to do with anything. He longs to be out of school when he’s in, and when he’s out he longs to be in. He doesn’t know what to do with any of his toys, even though his room is full of them. He doesn’t understand the point of numbers, words, school, or any sort of thing like that.

So, like any person like him would do, he drives his car (don’t ask me why a kid would have an automobile, I haven’t the slightest idea.) through the tollbooth. This is all after, of course, he randomly picks his destination from a strange map. He finds himself on the road to Dictionopolis, the land where words and letters are grown like fruit on trees. On his way, he meets a watchdog named Tock (who, by the way, has a clock for a body) who soon agrees to come with Milo on his journey. When they get to the great kingdom of dictionopolis, they find thing are very different. No one uses numbers and they soon find out why. Milo, Tock, and their new companion, the Humbug, set out on a quest to free Rhyme and Reason, the previous keepers of the peace in the kingdom of wisdom. Along the way they visit other strange lands such as Digitopolis (the land of numbers), the Forest of Sight (home of the color conductors), and Conclusions (you get there by jumping). They face many dangers and perils on their quest and the story comes to a melancholy, yet satisfying ending for all.

This is a quirky, funny, exiting story that will make you look at quite a few things differently. This book was on my book list for school and it just so happened to be in my bookshelf, sitting there, waiting for me to read it. I must confess I’m glad I did. This is a very easy story to read. I read it in less than a day, but I’m freakishly addicted to reading so sometimes I can understate the length of a book. But, nonetheless, I’m certain that this book can be tackled by young readers. I would recommend this book to readers eight to thirteen.

Posted by: Fred Reads

Re-Review and Reply: Tasting the Sky (Posted earlier by Janine Reads)

Title:  Tasting the Sky

Author:  Ibtisam Barakat

Publisher:  Melanie Kroupa Books, 2007

Genre:  Autobiography

As with Janine Reads’s post of The Berlin Boxing Club, you may remember the review of Tasting the Sky (posted in July, 2012). Well, I’ve decided to do the same thing as Janine Reads and post the book again, except in a different form.

First of all, I agree with Janine Reads when she said that she would recommend the book to ages twelve and up because there is some minor violence in it, which is all fine and well in an autobiography as long as it’s true and it isn’t marketed to a younger audience. I did not understand the first part of the book be cause it starts about thirteen years before the second part where the book really starts telling a story. Nor did I understand the third and last part of the story because it didn’t totally make sense. I don’t know why it stops there because it stops in a pretty random-looking spot in the story and I would have liked to know what happened afterward. Did she get a new goat? Was her new home safe? Where did her siblings go? These are questions that might have been answered if the story kept on going. These are all my real criticisms.

Don’t get me wrong, it was a really good book, but I thought it would have been better if, well, none of the things that you just read were true. My favorite part was how Alef, the first letter in her twenty-eight letter alphabet, became part of her life, how she, like Janine Reads stated, claims that he served her well during the war. A part that she did not give the details about and that I think I’m grateful she didn’t was her brothers’ circumcision. I was slightly disturbed when she said the slightest detail of it. This is another reason why twelve is a good recommended age.

This was a very sad story. In fact, I almost felt my eyes begin to slightly let go the tiniest subatomic molecule of moisture. A book of political and other issues of the Palestinian war, I thought that the book was surprisingly detailed through the memories of an adult person tracing her life all the way back until she was three and a half years old. This is definitely the best autobiography I have ever read.

 

Posted by: Fred Reads

Review and Summary: SCAT

Title:  SCAT

Author:  Carl Hiaasen

Publisher:  Alfred A. Knopf

Genre:  Mystery/Fiction

“Bunny Starch, the most feared biology teacher ever, is missing. She disappeared after a school field trip to Black Vine Swamp. And, to be honest, the kids in her class are relieved. The principle says she was called away on a “family emergency,” but Nick and Marta don’t buy it. They think Smoke, the class delinquent, has something to do with her disappearance. And he does! But not in a way that they think.”

I ask you, is this not an UNBELIEVABLY AWESOME way to introduce a book?! This is a book that has excellent depth, but not so much that kids don’t want to read it. It is about much more than what is said above. It is a slightly complicated story at first, but very soon it starts to make sense, and at the exact moment the story starts to heat up, if I may add. The class delinquent, Smoke (that’s a nickname, by the way), is an unsanitary, hulking, isolated teen that was held back two years in elementary school. If that’s not enough to say that he’s a troubled kid, the day before Mrs. Starch went missing he bit her pencil clean in half, swallowed it, and was fine the next day.

Nick is a regular middle-schooled kid who’s on the football team, lacrosse team, etc., etc., and you would think he was pretty normal if you looked at him first glance. Except, of course, the fact that he has his right arm tied behind his back for reasons that I’m not going to tell you. You have to read the book to find out. Marta is the girl who gets pulled into the plot for reasons that I am still scratching my head over. She’s the person in a good mystery story that you would expect to randomly yell “How did I get involved with this?!” Nonetheless, she plays an important roll in the story that you would not expect.

Finally, Bunny Starch is a terribly mean biology teacher (a good post, don’t you think?) who is one of those people who seems so calm it’s terrifying. She has an icy personality that her students seem to think is her only one, but when Nick and Marta go looking for her, they discover a softer, less fear-striking side. In a desperate attempt to get a feared, yet efficient teacher back, the headmaster replaces her with a substitute teacher that is a legendary wacko:  Wendell Waxmo. Waxmo is so bad that even the kids in the class long for Mrs. Starch to come back. Whenever someone makes a mistake, he makes them sing an embarrassing song like white Christmas or London Bridge is falling down. He even makes the class sing the pledge of allegiance.

This book is about many things that soon make one big messy plot. They include an oil scam, an eccentric environmentalist named Twilly, and panther poop. Carl Hiaasen is an extremely talented author. Among his other works are Hoot, Flush, and, very recently finished, Chomp. There is also a movie of his first book, Hoot, which came out in early May. They are all about nature avengers in the coasts of Florida. I will definitely read the rest of them. I would recommend this book to ages twelve and up.

Posted by: Fred Reads