Book Review Genre 5
TWU assignment
LS 5603 – 20
The Art of Keeping Cool
Bibliographic Data:
Lisle, Janet Taylor. 2000. The Art of Keeping Cool. New York: Athenium Books for Young Readers. ISBN 0689837879
Plot Summary:
During World War II, young Robert, whose father is called away to work as a war pilot, moves away from his family’s farm, to live next door to his Grandparents in Rhode Island. Here Robert begins a new chapter of his life, which will shape him forever.
Analysis:
Lisle takes the reader back in time, to the United States during World War II, and focuses her novel on the suddenly changed life of a thirteen-year-old boy, Robert. Robert’s father is away fighting, and his mother decides to move the family to Rhode Island to live near her in-laws.
It is here that the real story begins. Robert and his family get to know relatives that they had never met. Grandpa is generally an unpleasant and frightening man, Grandma is the family peacekeeper, and Aunt Nana and Uncle Jake are a nice couple, albeit financially down on their luck.
Lisle has a great talent for creating and revealing characters. For example, she describes Robert’s thirteen-year-old cousin, Elliot as follows:
“Elliot had a problem – he registered things too deep. Sometimes it seemed to me
as if his receivers were turned up too high on the world and what he saw came at
him with extra force.”
“There was no getting through to him. There never
was when he had one of his nervous shutdowns.”
The descriptions above are the best I have ever read to describe and explain a person with an anxiety disorder; this talent reveals Lisle as a master of her craft, and it most certainly makes the character of Elliot come alive for the reader, as she does for all of the book’s characters.
In Rhode Island, they live on the coast near an army fort that is protecting the United States coast from any potential German attacks. Lisle describes the feeling and scenes so well that the reader feels that he or she is actually living in wartime Rhode Island. This is done particularly well, by making the main protagonist a young boy, because children will relate to this much better than they do the usual World War II characters, who are usually grown men at war. The following describes measures that people around the coast were asked to do in order to keep the location of friendly ships secret and to prepare for any attacks.
“At night, we followed the fort’s orders to curtain and even double curtain our
windows, and everyone went to sleep with shoes and clothes laid out in case we
had to evacuate fast.”
Robert and Elliot become friends, and Elliot, who is very talented at drawing, causes them to meet a German artist, Able Hoffman, who lives in the area. It is not a good time to be a German expatriate in the United States, and he is highly suspect in the community. This storyline happens concurrently along with others, like family relationships and secrets, war, friendship, and growing up; this multidimensional plot makes this book hard to put down. For example, throughout the book, there is always an element of suspense: the mysterious German painter, the reason that Robert’s dad was never mentioned in his Grandparent’s home, if Robert’s father was alive and well overseas, and whether or not the Germans would attack the coast.
Review Excerpts
BookList, 09/15/2000
“Lisle weaves together the thrilling war action and the spy mystery with the battles in Robert's family and Robert's personal struggle with anger, jealousy, guilt, and betrayal.” -- Hazel Rochman. Booklist, published by the American Library Association.
Kirkus Reviews, 09/15/2000
“Briskly plotted, emotionally complex, brutal in incident yet delicately nuanced in the telling, a fine historical fiction.” (Fiction. 10-14) Copyright 2003, VNU Business Media, Inc. All Rights Reserved
The above reviews are from Book Index with Reviews. 2007 EBSCO Publishing,
Powered by The Title Source TM (Accessed through
http://online.twu.edu/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_id=_142_1 on October 24, 2007).
Connections:
Some books with similar themes: A Boy at War: A Novel of Pearl Harbor by Harry Mazer; Summer of My german Soldier by Bette Greene; Number the Stars by Lois Lowry; A Coming Evil by Vivien Vande Velde; Remember World War II: Kids Who Survived Tell Their Stories by Dorinda Makanaonalani Nicholson.
No comments:
Post a Comment