Lunch-Box Dream

Starred review from May 2, 2011
Set in the summer of 1959, Abbott's sophisticated novel explores racial and family tensions, as well as death, through several perspectives. The primary narrator is Bobby, who does not like being around "chocolate" people, and who is on a road trip with his mother and older brother, Ricky, returning his recently widowed grandmother to her home in Florida. As a reward for the long hot drive, they visit Civil War battlefields between Ohio and Florida, feeding Ricky's obsession with the history of that conflict and fueling Bobby's uneasiness around death. Interspersed with the recounting of their journey is the story of a black family in Georgia, movingly told in small fragments by a variety of first-person voices. (The book helpfully opens with a list of the characters and their relationshipsâan essential resource.) In the final scenes, the separate stories converge, with subtle finesse, in one small, iconic physical gesture. Throughout, Abbott (Firegirl) builds an increasingly disturbing undercurrent of racial conflict, sibling distrust, and marital discord. Although beautifully crafted and written, the book's emotional complexity and unsettling tone will likely prove challenging (in multiple senses of the word) for the target audience. Ages 10â14.

June 15, 2011

In 1959 on a Civil War battleground tour, a white northern boy has his own prejudices shaken when he sees Jim Crow in action in a Joycean exploration that seems uncertain of its audience.

Bobby (of indeterminate age), his Civil War–obsessed older brother, Ricky, and their mother take the scenic route on the way to deliver the boys' grandmother and her car to her home in St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, 9-year-old African-American Jacob leaves his sister and her husband in Atlanta to visit relatives in small-town Dalton, Ga., and he's a little unclear about proper behavior around whites. When a combination of stress over marital problems and unnecessary, abject racial terror causes Bobby's mother to total the car in Atlanta, they send Grandma south and, much to Bobby's mortification, book a bus home. Bobby finds himself on the same bus with Jacob's family on an emergency trip to find the boy, who's gone missing, and Bobby's worldview takes an epiphanic hit. The narrative shifts from Bobby's perspective in a focused, third-person voice to the first-person accounts of a number of secondary characters. These voices, particularly those of the African-Americans, are mostly indistinct, their accounts seesawing from elliptical to expository. This, together with historical references that will likely slip past children and sometimes tortured syntax, derails prolific series fantasist Abbott's (The Secrets of Droon) attempt at an autobiographical historical novel.

A laudable attempt to address an unfortunately still-timely subject, this novel feels more like a Modernist experiment than a children's book. (Historical fiction. 9-12)

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

September 1, 2011

Gr 4-6-It is 1959, and nine-year-old Bobby's mother decides to make a vacation out of driving Grandma from Ohio back to her Florida home with planned stops at various Civil War battlefields and landmarks. Parallel to this narrative of a white middle-class family is one of a Southern African-American family. Nine-year-old Jacob is under the care and tutelage of his older sister and her husband in Atlanta, struggling to live within their Jim Crow environment and conscious about not making waves outside their insulated community. On a visit to Dalton, the boy innocently makes a public remark and then suddenly does not return home. In an incident much like the famous Emmett Till case, there is an implication that a similarly drastic outcome occurs, but it is not explicitly explained as the story progresses from multiple perspectives. Bobby and Jacob are worlds apart in their experiences yet closely linked in their naivete about bigotry's often fatal consequences. Bobby's family vacation turns sour as a wrong turn brings them to an obviously poor, African-American area. Bobby's panicked mother recklessly totals the car in a foolish attempt to escape. When the two families are forced to ride the bus, their paths cross at a bus station. Abbott's true-to-life descriptions and complicated story lines set in the volatile, pre-Civil Rights era will leave readers with much to think about and discuss when considering race relations in our country's history.-Rita Soltan, Youth Services Consultant, West Bloomfield, MI

Copyright 2011 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2011
Grades 5-8 The segregated South in 1959 is the setting for this intense novel about the journeys of two families, one white, one black, told from multiple viewpoints. Bobby and his older brother, Ricky, are driving with their mother from Cleveland to take their recently widowed Hungarian grandmother home to Florida. Also on the road is Louisa, who is traveling from Atlanta. When her beloved little brother, Jacob, 9, goes missing in Columbus, Ohio, her African American family fears that he is the victim of a hate crime. After Bobby's mother crashes the car, the two families come together on a segregated bus that is so crowded that Louisa and her parents may not be able to board, even at the back. The switches between voices get confusing at times, but each spare chapter is an intense, complex drama of political history and personal conflict, and readers will want to talk about the characters' changing viewpoints, especially Bobby's, as he witnesses the realities of Jim Crow laws and wakes up to his own racism.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)