Book Review: The Day of the Pelican
The Sacramento Bee
Oct 26, 2009
The Day of the Pelican
Katherine Paterson
Clarion, $16, 160 pages; ages 10 and up
The Unfinished Angel
Sharon Creech
HarperCollins, $15.99, 164 pages; ages 8-12
What a book-rich month October has become. Two more Newbery Medal authors have new titles, right on the heels of Kate DiCamillo's "The Magician's Elephant."
Both Katherine Paterson, best known for "A Bridge to Terabithia," and Sharon Creech, author of "Walk Two Moons," have written books with the theme of "finding home." But the stories couldn't be more different.
"The Day of the Pelican" follows a family of Albanian Kosovars as they flee a brutal "ethnic cleansing" campaign by the Serbs in 1998.
Meli Lleshi believes she started her family's troubles when she drew a caricature of her teacher, Mr. Uka, as a pelican. He discovered the drawing and kept Meli and her friend, Zana, after class, which angered Meli's older brother, Mehmet, who left for home without the girls. When Mehmet disappears, the large Lleshi family fears he has been jailed by Serb soldiers, perhaps killed.
Mehmet survives, but his ordeal sets the family on a long road to another life in America. The Lleshis leave behind their apartment and store in town, camp in the mountains, then move in with the extended family on the ancestral farm. Driven even from there when the farmhouse is burned, they become refugees on the road to Macedonia, then live in a camp where eventually they acquire a sponsor: a church in Vermont.
Paterson based her story in part on the real-life survival of a family sponsored by her church, as well as her experiences as a child in World War II China. "Pelican" is fascinating and fast-moving, an important window on life in oppressive circumstances. The book is all about the narrative, however, rather than the characters -- it is more fictionalized nonfiction than a novel.
"The Unfinished Angel," on the other hand, unfolds in the endearing voice of the title character, an angel who has lived for centuries in a small town in the Italian-speaking region of Switzerland. (It is waiting to be given the rest of its instructions.)
Although invisible to most humans, the angel is spotted by a young American, Zola, who has just moved to town with her father, who plans to open a school. Zola is more than colorful -- she's a life force, and she soon enlists the angel in helping a multinational group of orphans she has discovered living up the mountain in an old chicken coop.
The little town comes to life in wonderful ways, thanks to Zola, the angel and the orphans. Here, "finding home" also means rediscovering the one that has been there all along.
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Copyright 2009 by The Sacramento Bee
