The Color of Absence : 12 Stories About Loss and Hope - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0689828624 ISBN 13: 9780689828621

Publisher: Atheneum, 2001

Synopsis

A collection of twelve stories for young adults explores the topic of loss in various forms and the manner in which people learn to cope with it in order to move on in their lives.

About this title

About the Author

James Howe lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and is the author of over sixty books for young people. His first book, Bunnicula, published in 1979, was the recipient of numerous state and regional young readers' choice awards and was named by the Books for Kids Foundation as one of the Top 100 Children's Books of the 20th Century. In addition to Bunnicula and its five sequels, James Howe is most known for the Pinky and Rex beginning reader series, the Sebastian Barth mysteries, and his highly acclaimed young adult novel, The Watcher.

Reviews

Gr 7-10-Howe invited 12 well-known YA authors to contribute pieces and added a story of his own to the mix, resulting in a finely crafted anthology. It starts out with a tremendously moving piece by Annette Curtis Klause, in which the vampire Simon (from her novel The Silver Kiss) braves entering a church in order to try to save his beloved cat during the Summer of Love. He realizes that loving Grimalkin and losing her was the most painful thing he could ever encounter, but that the experience has transformed him into a being with a sort of soul. Other stories vary widely and may serve to entice teens with different reading tastes-some may have a stronger emotional response to a story about the end of a relationship than to the loss of a grandparent, or vice versa. All of these selections share themes of hope, and show that what you endure makes you stronger, and that loss provides the opportunity to reassess and cherish personal relationships. A solid choice for all collections.

Susan Riley, Mount Kisco Public Library, NY

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Two short story collections address the emotional life of adolescents. The author of the Bunnicula books, James Howe, collects a dozen works (one of which he penned himself) in The Color of Absence: 12 Stories About Loss and Hope. Walter Dean Myers's "Season's End" covers much more than the close of baseball season; in "Shoofly Pie," Naomi Shihab Nye explores the way humor and sadness live side by side; and Jacqueline Woodson and Chris Lynch collaborate on "The Rialto," excerpted from a forthcoming novel.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Gr. 6-10. The uneasy intersection of loss and hope provides the thematic setting for this collection of 11 original stories and one excerpt, "The Rialto," from a novel-in-progress coauthored by Jacqueline Woodson and Chris Lynch. Other contributors include such leading young adult authors as Walter Dean Myers, Annette Curtis Klause, Norma Fox Mazer, and Virginia Euwer Wolff. All of the stories are professionally executed but--perhaps because loss is inherently sad--too many strike the same note of melancholy and deal with the theme in ways that are often predictable. Happily there are notable exceptions. Klause reintroduces Simon the vampire in a story invested with emotional resonance; Naomi Shihab Nye feeds loss with metaphoric food; and Wolff demonstrates the spare power of understatement in her story-in-dialogue, "The Chair." What these and several other good stories in the book demonstrate is that loss can be redeemed not only by hope but also by art. Michael Cart
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Atheneum
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0689828624
• ISBN 13: 9780689828621
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256
• Editor: Howe James