A space-time traveling phone that uses secret government satellites is just the latest invention she tests on her occasional guinea pig, Rahim. Bestie and home-schooled neighbor Kasia Collins, in contrast, lives in a tech-filled wonderland and is the genius behind most of her home’s innovations. Philadelphia seventh grader Rahim Reynolds wants to be a rapper like Four the Hard Way, his favorite ’90s group, but if he’s not getting bullied at school, his history professor father’s strict anti-tech, all-books policies make things hard at home. In this entertaining novel centering Black tweens by noted musician and filmmaker Questlove and bestselling author Cosby, the gift of a supersmart phone is a godsend…until it’s very much not. Thoughtful, expertly plotted, richly imaginative and entertaining. While bringing in many amusing details (neither girl's money is usable-inflation renders Ada's worthless Amber's coins bear unknown faces) and several serious themes (Ada's heritage is German Amber is Jewish, with a passionately anti-German grandfather, a Holocaust survivor), Griffin keeps events moving briskly and gets the girls home again via a clever mechanism, meanwhile making some satisfying revelations about Ada's later life and its impact on the characters of the present. With each era viewed from the perspective of the other, the wealth of social history here is put into sharp relief, with some surprising similarities (there were drug addicts and unhappy marriages in 1891, too) as well as advantages and disadvantages in each. In alternating chapters, using parallel experiences, each girl makes friends, endures the rigors of a children's home, and is taken in by the other's parents. On the day of San Antonio's 1891 ``Battle of the Flowers,'' Ada Bauer, chafing under a teacher's criticism of her essay on women's rights, stands over a well and wishes she ``lived a hundred years from now.'' On the same day in 1991, Amber Burak-who's just learned that her parents are divorcing and who's distressed by the children's troubles in a home where her mom is a social worker-makes the same wish in reverse.
0 kommentar(er)
