Soldier's Secret by Sheila Solomon Klass

His professor mom’s new tenure-track job transplants Norris mid–school year, and his biting wit and sarcasm are exposed through his cataloging of his new world in a field guide–style burn book. Norris Kaplan, the protagonist of Philippe’s debut novel, is a hypersweaty, uber-snarky black, Haitian, French-Canadian pushing to survive life in his new school. Steve writes: “But hey! Joy / is not a crime, though / some people / make it seem so.”Īt the end of the term, a new student who is black and Vietnamese finds a morsel of hope that she too will find a place in the poetry.Ī teenage, not-so-lonely loner endures the wilds of high school in Austin, Texas. Beyond those capsules are rich and complex teens, and their tentative reaching out to each other increases as through the poems they also find more of themselves. Among them: Janelle, who is tired of being called fat Leslie, who finds friendship in another who has lost her mom Diondra, who hides her art from her father Tyrone, who has faith in words and in his “moms” Devon, whose love for books and jazz gets jeers. All of them, black, Latino, white, male, and female, talk about the unease and alienation endemic to their ages, and they do it in fresh and appealing voices. The chapters in the students’ voices alternate with the poems read by that student, defiant, shy, terrified. Ward, every month, and then later, every week. Soon there’s an open-mike poetry reading, sponsored by Mr. Ward, accepts a set of poems from Wesley, his response to a month of reading poetry from the Harlem Renaissance.

This is almost like a play for 18 voices, as Grimes ( Stepping Out with Grandma Mac, not reviewed, etc.) moves her narration among a group of high school students in the Bronx. (author’s note, chronology) (Historical fiction. A good match with Anita Silvey’s I’ll Pass for Your Comrade (2008). And an engrossing tale it is, of a woman’s journey in a man’s war, offering a fascinating portrait of a new nation emerging from the crucible of war, disease and political upheaval. Rooting her tale in the facts of Sampson’s story and inventing dialogue, a romance and supporting characters, Klass tells Sampson/Shurtliff’s wartime saga as a tale like Scheherazade’s, with Deborah writing the stories to earn the silence of her attending physician. She had been a “give-away child,” abandoned by her father and given up by her mother, and after ten years of indentured servitude, she became a “masterless” woman and ran off to war to avoid marriage. Sampson, fiercely patriotic, fought in the American Revolution, taking the name of her deceased older brother, Robert Shurtliff. Signing a proclamation on May 23, 1983, Governor Michael Dukakis named Deborah Sampson an “Official Heroine of the State of Massachusetts,” the first person ever to be so honored.

Soldier's Secret by Sheila Solomon Klass