Skip to main content

The Warden's Daughter

Image
By

The Warden's Daughter
By Jerry Spinelli
Random House, 2017. Fiction.

Cammie O'Reilly's life has always been a little bit different. Most kids have backyards, she has the Women's Yard. Most kids have treehouses, she has The Tower. Most kids have mothers, she doesn't - yet. Her own mother was killed in an accident saving her life when she was just a baby, leaving her alone with her father, the prison warden. The summer Cammie turns thirteen, she decides to find herself a new mother to do all the motherly things she misses out on, and she picks Eloda Pupko - the prison trustee who acts as her housekeeper. As the summer goes by, Eloda resists the role of mother that Cammie tries to thrust on her, as Cammie's anger at her different life bubbles deeper and deeper.

The Warden's Daughter is a great historical fiction novel filled with really interesting (if not always likable) characters. Set in the same same fictional town as Manaic Magee, this book shows Jerry Spinelli at his best - which is very good. At times, Cammie can be a real pain and many readers will have trouble identifying with her actions, but this makes her character development more satisfying. This book is filled with very real emotion and tangible frustration in the midst of stretches of truly beautiful language. This book will likely strike a chord with more advanced middle graders.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: The Factory

By
The Factory By Catherine Egan New York, NY : Scholastic Inc., 2025. Fiction. 306 pages.  Thirteen-year-old Asher Doyle has been invited to join the Factory, a secretive research facility in the desert which ostensibly extracts renewable energy from the electromagnetic fields of its young recruits. But Asher soon realizes something sinister is going on. Kids are getting sick. The adults who run the Factory seem to be keeping secrets. And the extraction process is not only painful and exhausting, but existentially troubling. Asher makes a handful of new friends who help him with an investigation that turns into a resistance, which turns into...a cliffhanger! The Factory is a page-turning sci-fi with multidimensional characters, an intriguing plot, and refreshingly straight-forward writing. Egan weaves in detail about climate crises and social unrest, making the story's dystopian setting feel rich and plausible. With its sophisticated themes and accessible storytelling, I would recomm...
Post a Comment
Read more

Review: Fowl Play

By
  Fowl Play By Kristin O'Donnell Tubb New York: Katherine Tegen Books, 2024. Fiction 277 pages. Still reeling from her beloved uncle's death, Chloe Alvarez is comforted and confused when at his last will and testament reading, Uncle Will gifts her his African Grey parrot, Charlie. Charlie has a robust vocabulary and loves to make Alexa requests for her favorite songs, but when she starts saying things like, "homicide," and "cyanide," Chloe becomes convinced that Uncle Will may have met his demise by murder instead of a genetic disease, as was previously thought. Ultimately, bringing in her brother, Grammy, and Uncle Frank (and of course Charlie,) Chloe's ragtag and adoring family support her search for answers ---going on stakeouts, engaging in fast pursuits, and searching for clues. But as the suspects stack up and the mystery grows, Chole will learn that the process of death and grieving is complicated, and in the end her Uncle Will's words that, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry

By DeeDee
National Geographic Book of Animal Poetry Edited by J. Patrick Lewis National Geographic, 2012, 183 p. Poetry In this beautiful poetry collection, the National Children's Poet Laureate, J. Patrick Lewis, has teamed up with the amazing photographers at National Geographic. The result is 200 poems about animals, all illustrated with stunning nature photography.  The poems are well chosen and include rhyming, free verse, and shape poetry. Some of the poems are funny, many are contemplative and all are nicely typeset on top of the full color photographs. One of my favorites is a shape poem about flamingos, with a photograph of a flock of flamingos which seem to be standing the the shape of a flamingo (how did they do that?).  Lewis ends the collection with a brief but interesting section about writing animal poetry.  This selection is sure to turn any animal lover into a poetry lover.
Post a Comment
Read more