The Heart Is Big Enough: Five Stories

Collects the stories of five adolescents who overcome the challenges of prejudice, divorce, age, illness, and fear, from a disabled Matt, who discovers his talent for swimming, to Jonathan, who is sent away to boarding school.

Grade 4-7. The author of A School for Pompey Walker (1995) and Elijah's Angel (1992, both Harcourt) addresses an older audience in this uneven collection about adolescents wrestling with personal problems. The best of these stories eloquently depict the passionate interests of these youthful protagonists. In the first of the five, 12-year-old Matthew's artificial hip inhibits his social life and threatens to ruin his summer as an intern at an institute for dolphin research. The boy's obsessive study of these animals will convince readers that his magical interlude with the creatures is completely believable. The sensual and lyrical language makes this selection a standout. In another offering, Decker's poignant gift of "remembering" movies for his grandmother afflicted with Alzheimer's disease and her reciprocation will bring tears to the eyes of many readers. Other stories are more labored, with long twisting clauses, convoluted parenthetical phrases, and less compelling situations. While all of the stories suggest intergenerational connections, parents are distant. Mothers (with the exception of Matthew's understanding mom) are shrill and unsupportive. Anne Fine's Step by Wicked Step (Little, Brown, 1996) and E. L. Konigsberg's The View from Saturday (S & S, 1996) are two stellar books that highlight adolescent problems with dazzling prose and inventive structure.?Marilyn Payne Phillips, University City Public Library, MO
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Rosen (This Is Our House, 1996, etc.) has written five short stories about protagonists on the cusp of adolescence in tales that are honest, captivating, and occasionally inspiring. In ``The Trust of a Dolphin,'' Matt, who is hindered by a partially-plastic hip, realizes his dream when he lands a job at a summer camp for teens interested in ocean life, and swims with a pod of dolphins. The best story of the collection, it is the deft blend of vivid detail and spare prose that makes palpable Matt's excitement and his joy at overcoming a minor disability. Learning to interact with others as equals is at the center of Frayda's story, ``The Walkers of Hawthorn Park.'' Although her grandmother is a kind-hearted woman willing to spend hours teaching her gardening, she wants Frayda to keep her distance from her strange neighbors, transients who live in a group home next door. Relationships with grandparents are part of other stories, too, where young characters learn to accept their aging relatives' physical and mental limitations and show them their love. Rosen's message is uniformly empowering: Even in the face of disease, divorce, or disability, the human heart is truly big enough. (b&w illustrations) (Short stories. 9-12) -- Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gr. 5^-7. Nature plays a thrilling role in these five short stories about preteens who reach beyond age and disability and prejudice. In the longest and best piece, a boy with a partly plastic hip feels heavy and clumsy and is in constant pain until he swims with the dolphins at a marine biology center on Key Largo, and they bond with him. There's nothing mystical or reverential about the connection. In all the stories, the excitement is grounded in hard work, biological fact, and physical particularity, whether the setting is the ocean, the beach, or the yard. A girl helps the mentally-ill residents of a group home make a garden, and they become part of the neighborhood. A boy feels a constant, "almost nervous amazement" about his grandmother's lifelong collection of biology specimens; he loves handling them, naming them, classifying them. The human connections are natural, too: edgy, sometimes difficult, nurturing, growing. To have illustrations by Matthew Valiquette. Hazel Rochman