THE DIRTY WAR.

A story of Argentina's Dirty War portrays a young boy who looks the other way when people disappear, until his father is taken and he has to find the courage to ask questions--and to stay alive

Grade 8 Up-Atre, 14, and his friend Chino are caught up in the rapidly changing political climate in Buenos Aires. It is 1976, and the generals have taken over the Argentine government. The people initially hope for improvement in the economic conditions, but the military rule quickly becomes one of terror and repression. Citizens begin to vanish, but no one knows-or will not tell-where or why they have been taken. Atre's grandmother joins other mothers and grandmothers in protesting the disappearances, braving beatings and arrests, and Atre begins to become more involved, eventually learning the fate of the victims of the Dirty War. The descriptions of torture and intimidation are graphic and shocking, but they are, unfortunately, a vital part of the story. The strength of the book is the unrelenting revelation of these actual events. The characters are secondary, and are not fully fleshed out. The writing style is very simple, which is sometimes effective, but other times seems choppy. Focusing the narrative through the eyes of Atre increases the impact, as the normal actions of teenage life are inevitably tied to the inhuman effects of the military takeover. James Watson's Talking in Whispers (Knopf, 1984; o.p.) is similar in approach and content. Both titles present a harsh, but real accounting of world situations that may be unfamiliar to American teens.
Carrol McCarthy, Tower Hill School, Wilmington, DE
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Argentina's military regime of the late '70s provides the chilling backdrop to this novel about the Dirty War, in which thousands of people deemed "threats" to the government were covertly tortured and killed. Atre (from atreverse, to dare) and his friend Chino constantly scheme to make money, just as Atre's father, owner of a small cruise boat company, does on a larger scale. And like Atre's father, the boys' business activities in La Boca, a scruffy but hard-working area of Buenos Aires, bring sudden trouble. Slaughter traces the family's terror when Atre's father becomes one of the "disappeared." He returns to them, alive, after they heed a message to sell their new house to a certain colonel who covets it. Chino is not so lucky when, implicated in a petty fraud to evade a book tax, he joins the ranks of the disappeared. Atre never knows for sure, but has good reason to believe that Chino is brutally murdered. Conversations and newspaper items suggest the extent of the Dirty War, and some of the opposition to it; Atre's grandmother is one of the celebrated and courageous Mothers of the Plaza. The storytelling may lack complexity, but the subject matter is gripping. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Gr. 6-9. This story, set in Argentina, takes place between 1976 and the early 1980s, a time during which people could not speak out against the government for fear of being seized, never to reappear. Fourteen-year-old Atre and his friend Chino think of themselves as remote from politics. Their concern is making money from tourists. When Atre's father disappears and his grandmother joins the "Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo," who risk government wrath by staging public protests over the disappearances, Atre learns he can't dodge terror. The author has done his homework on the historical events and paints a clear picture of life in Buenos Aires. He's less adept with emotional dynamics and the casting of characters: Atre's little sister, for instance, who seems quite young at the beginning, is soon ditching school and smoking cigarettes. Readers will learn many details about what happened during the terrible times, but they won't feel as if they're living it vicariously. Mary Harris Veeder