EclipseAges: 8 and up Pages: 136 List Price: $16.95 Cover: Hardcover Published: 10/1/2006 ISBN: 1-932425-21-7 ISBN-13: 978-1-932425-21-5 |
In 1952 eight-year-old Peti's Hungarian relatives come to live with his family in America. His older cousin Gabor is a sullen boy who argues with his parents, and bullies Peti. Peti's only escape is to the local library, where he reads about everything from the solar system to pinhole cameras and secret codes. Peti wants Gabor to move out, but Uncle Jozsef can't find a job, and Peti's mother has to find work instead. The landlady is threatening to evict them, and the boys in the neighborhood are dreaming up trouble. To top it all off, Peti's mother worries constantly about her father, who is behind the Iron Curtain in Hungary. When the librarian invites Peti to go with her on a tour of the Rankin House, once a stop on the Underground Railroad, the day trip turns into much more than a chance to get away from tension at home. Peti comes back with a new understanding of friendship and family, new insights about human nature, and a new resolve to stand up for himself. Awards
Reviews"In its quiet way, this is a remarkable and original book." "The pain of the immigrant experience ... is compellingly captured in this spare, unsentimental novel." "Cheng achieves a pitch-perfect characterization for this Hungarian-American boy in the early 1950s. ...His few possessions are well beloved, and his insatiable thirst for knowledge about his world is age-authentic. The metaphors that Cheng provides, her straightforward prose, and the connections she draws between life behind the Iron Curtain and life under American slavery make the difficult concepts Peti must contend with understandable to both him and the reader; children with and without first-hand experience with immigration and relatives in danger in faraway lands will warm to Peti's plight." |
