Jakarta Missing by Jane Kurtz. (2001) Reading Level: Ages 9-12. 272 pages. Greenwillow/
HarperCollins. ISBN: 0060294019. $15.9RE |
Reviews and Things
for: Jakarta Missing
by Jane Kurtz
Amazon.com's 2001 Editors' Choice: Children's Books (9-12)
Read the review from the "kidsreads.com" site.
"Jane Kurtz's delightful,
original novel stars worrywart Dakar, a very human, very well-read,
very bright girl with a richly textured imagination and fascinating
fresh perspectives on Midwestern life. Dakar has reason to be a
worrywart." -- Karin Snelson, Amazon.com
"... highly appealing
... Kurtz tells this story well, with wonderful descriptions of places
and people. ... The basketball sequences are related with passion,
obviously told by a writer who has been to many exciting games." -- KLIATT, March 2001
"Twelve-year-old Dakar, 'worrymeister'
storyteller has recently come 'home' to the U.S. after a childhood
spent in Africa. . . . the novel focuses on how Dakar and, eventually,
her family, realign themselves, with much of the external action
generated by the girls' basketball team Jakarta leads to 'regionals'
.... Closer to home (and more diffuse) than Abelove's Go and Come Back,
this too offers glimpses outside the usual boxes, gently expanding the
reader's understanding of how 'terrifying and wonderful' life can be." -- Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books
"Kurtz uses her own
knowledge of Africa to bring vividness and beauty to Dakar's
memories..With its well-written sports action.this book would be
recommended best to middle school girls with an interest in basketball
or sister relationships." -- VOYA
"Dakar and
Jakarta and, to a lesser extent, their parents are developed characters
with realistically complex motivations and less-than-perfect
understandings of one another and of themselves. ... readers will be
caught up in [the story] and will devour the details of exotic foreign
and everyday family and school lives." -- School Library Journal
"Kurtz's
evocative language captures "the sweetness, mystery, and danger of
foreign places and helps to express the symbiotic relationship between
two sisters-one the briar, the other the rose." -- Booklist
"Kurtz
presents resonant images ... This tightly controlled, intense interior
novel (most of it takes place inside Dakar's head) ends with Dakar
really beginning to understand the enormous truth that life is
terrifying-and wonderful." -- Horn Book
"Ambitious
and complex, Kurtz's (Faraway Home) novel...offers a heady blend of
universally relevant insight and an appreciation of the exotic." -- Publishers Weekly
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