JERRY SPINELLI is the author of many novels for young readers, including Dead Wednesday, The Warden's Daughter; Stargirl; Love, Stargirl; Milkweed; Crash; Wringer; and Maniac Magee, winner of the Newbery Medal; along with Knots in My Yo-Yo String, the autobiography of his childhood. A graduate of Gettysburg College, he lives in Pennsylvania with his wife, poet and author Eileen Spinelli.
"An extremely powerful book. Readers will be gripped by this story
of a young orphan in Warsaw." -- Boston Herald
"Jerry Spinelli has fashioned a novel of beauty out of the ugliness
of the Holocaust. It is a superb book, one of the best you will
read." -- BookPage
"Stunning." -- Kirkus Reviews, Starred
"Spinelli creates a masterful achievement, a war story to be put
alongside J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun and a literary
accompaniement to Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful." -- VOYA
"An unforgettable novel."--Library Media Connection, Starred
"Part survival adventure, part Holocaust history, [this] novel
tells the story through the eyes of a Polish orphan on the run from
the Nazis."--Booklist, Starred review
"This is a superb addition to the canon of young adult
literature."--Jewish Book World
"Unforgettable. . . a powerful story about one small boy's courage
during a horrifying period of history. A heartbreaking and
ultimately hopeful story." -- The Midwest Book Review
For this WWII tale set in Warsaw, Spinelli (Wringer) invents a narrator akin to Roberto Benigni's character in Life Is Beautiful. The narrator intermittently indicates that he has some distance from the events, but his perspective affords him no insight, so readers may be as confounded as he. As the novel opens, Uri, a larger boy, chases down the narrator and pries away the loaf of bread he has pinched: " `I'm Uri... What's your name?'... `Stopthief.' " After Uri realizes that the boy truly does not know his own name, Uri gives him one-Misha Pilsudski-as well as a past (befitting the boy's "Gypsy" appearance). Simple-minded Misha admires the Nazis, whom the boys call "Jackboots" ("They were magnificent. There were men attached to them, but it was as if the boots were wearing the men.... A thousand of them swinging up as one, falling like the footstep of a single, thousand-footed giant"). Misha comes off as a clown, and for children unfamiliar with the occupation and its horrors, the juxtaposition of events and Misha's detached relating of them may be baffling (Nazis force Jews to wash the street with their beards, and hang one of Misha's friends from a street lamp). At times, he seems self-aware ("I had no sense. If I had had sense, I would know what all the other children knew: the best defense... was invisibility"), yet these moments are aberrations; he never learns from his experience, and a postlude does little to bring either his perspective or the era into focus. Ages 10-up. (Sept.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
"An extremely powerful book. Readers will be gripped by this story
of a young orphan in Warsaw." -- Boston Herald
"Jerry Spinelli has fashioned a novel of beauty out of the ugliness
of the Holocaust. It is a superb book, one of the best you will
read." -- BookPage
"Stunning." -- Kirkus Reviews, Starred
"Spinelli creates a masterful achievement, a war story to be put
alongside J. G. Ballard's Empire of the Sun and a literary
accompaniement to Roberto Benigni's Life Is Beautiful." --
VOYA
"An unforgettable novel."--Library Media Connection,
Starred
"Part survival adventure, part Holocaust history, [this] novel
tells the story through the eyes of a Polish orphan on the run from
the Nazis."--Booklist, Starred review
"This is a superb addition to the canon of young adult
literature."--Jewish Book World
"Unforgettable. . . a powerful story about one small boy's courage
during a horrifying period of history. A heartbreaking and
ultimately hopeful story." -- The Midwest Book Review
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