The Eagle Kite: A Novel - Hardcover

Fox, Paula

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0531087425 ISBN 13: 9780531087428

Publisher: Orchard Books, 1995

Synopsis

His mother's news that his father is seriously ill from a blood transfusion causes Liam to recall seeing his father embrace another man on the beach three years earlier and to find a way to come to terms with shock and sorrow. By the author of Western Wind.

About this title

From School Library Journal:

Grade 8-12?Liam, a high school freshman, learns that his father is dying of AIDS. Suddenly, his comfortable family is in pieces, and his father has gone to live in a seashore cottage two hours from the family's city apartment. Distanced from both parents by secrets each of them seems compelled to keep, Liam remembers having seen his father embrace a young man years before?a friend, his father had said. In the remainder of the book, Liam and his parents wrestle with truths that encompass not just disappointment and betrayal, but intense love. This is far more than a problem novel. AIDS is integral to the plot, the issue is handled well, and the character who has AIDS is portayed sympathetically, but the book's scope is broader than that. It is a subtly textured exploration of the emotions of grief that will appeal to the same young people drawn to Mollie Hunter's A Sound of Chariots (HarperCollins, 1972) and Cynthia Rylant's Missing May (Orchard, 1992). Dramatic tension is palpable, sustained in part by a dazed, timeless quality in Liam's slow reckoning with loss. The characters are neither idealized nor demonized, and Fox's take on Liam as a confused, seethingly angry, tight-lipped, surreptitiously tender teenager has the ring of authenticity. Some in the target audience may find the action too slow or the mood too dark, but those who persevere will be rewarded by the novel's truthfulness.?Claudia Morrow, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist:

TITLR /*Starred Review*/ Gr. 6-10. Liam's father is dying of AIDS. He got it from a blood transfusion, Liam's mother says. My father has cancer, Liam tells his girlfriend. But Liam remembers what he has made himself forget, that more than two years earlier he had seen his father embrace a young man on the beach. Now, through the long, dreary months of the illness, while his father lives alone in a rented cottage on the shore, Liam goes through a tangled mess of denial, anger, shame, grief, and empathy. As in Fox's Village by the Sea (1988), there's an unkind relative, an aunt who knows she's mean and is helpless to be otherwise. And as in One-Eyed Cat (1984), the sick parent is flawed, funny, gentle. Fox writes in ordinary words about universal things: love and death and lies and also time and memory--how they seem and what they are. The story confronts our deepest fears: what if the scarecrow beggar out there on the street, the statistic in sex-ed class, the demon of the howling mob came right into our comfortable home? Scenes burn in your memory: that embrace on the beach, the suppressed fury in the pauses of conversation. Fox avoids nothing about the dying and the anguish of survival. The plain note Philip leaves for his wife and son says it all: "My two dears. There's hardly anything left of me."

About this edition

• Publisher: Orchard Books
• Publication date: 1995
• ISBN 10: 0531087425
• ISBN 13: 9780531087428
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 127