North

Publishers Weekly

Napoli (Beast; Daughter of Venice) may not be able to hook her usual fans with this overlong adventure tale, which begins rather thinly. Alvin, the protagonist, is a 12-year-old African-American boy growing up in a matriarchal household in Washington, D.C. As presented here, Alvin's life resembles something broadly depicted on a television after-school special: his strict mother forbids him to go into white neighborhoods without her, and his grandmother always backs her up. "If the mamma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy" is one of Grandma's favorite sayings, and early on she chuckles at having bought a sweatshirt with those words for a Kwanzaa present: "Grandma didn't care one way or the other about Kwanzaa, but she was ready to take advantage of anything that would allow her a belly laugh." When he walks away from a drug dealer's offer to make him a runner, his mother chastises him for speaking to a dealer in the first place. Having plunged into an assignment for African-American History Month to research his hero, Matthew Henson, Alvin now decides to run away and retrace Henson's path to the North Pole. By this point the plot requires a major suspension of disbelief; unfortunately, the author probably won't have earned the audience's willingness to go along. The road trip that follows brings a pastiche of characters from different cultures; a band of Inuk ranks among the most intriguing. While the setting becomes exotic, the narrative hews to convention: Alvin broadens his view of the world and learns gratitude for his family and home. Ages 9-up. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

School Library Journal

Gr 5-8-Napoli, perhaps best known for her retold fairy tales and legends, spins a compelling, modern adventure. Sixth-grader Alvin, nicknamed "Dwarf" by classmates, is dying under his fearful Mamma's overprotectiveness. When his teacher gives an assignment to select a famous African American to study, Alvin is intrigued by Matthew Henson. Starved for adventure, the boy decides to run away to the North Pole-in January. Using the money he has saved for a bicycle, he leaves his Washington, DC, neighborhood on a train bound for New York, then heads to Toronto, then on to Winnepeg. Several adults, and lots of luck, help him along the way. In Winnepeg, he jumps into a freight car bound for Churchill, nearly freezing to death during the more than 33-hour trip. Here he connects with Inuit people (he's the first African American they've ever seen), who help him get to Bylot Island near the Arctic Circle, where he spends a season with a trapper, learning to survive sunless days, eating lemming and walrus stew, and rapidly growing in stature and self-confidence. The final page finds the boy, in June, arriving home. Napoli includes lots of interesting information about Henson and Inuit culture, and important messages about the value of cultural diversity. Alvin's luck may strain credibility at times, but readers will be cheering him on. He will inspire them to believe that even the most daunting obstacles can be overcome.-Connie Tyrrell Burns, Mahoney Middle School, South Portland, ME Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

Driven by a yearning he can't articulate but knows is essential to his very being, Alvin, a soft and unsophisticated 12-year-old African-American boy living in Washington, D.C., runs away from his caring but smothering mother and physically declining great grandmother. His goal is to follow in the footsteps of his hero Matthew Henson, a black explorer and co-discoverer of the North Pole, whose description of the "fierce beauty" of the frozen north has captured his imagination. Traveling by rail and later dog-sledge in the frigid cold, Alvin, who is dogged, resourceful, and has the rare capacity to find friends and create allies, makes it all the way to Canada's Bylot Island, high in the Arctic Circle. There he gains knowledge, maturity, and, ultimately, freedom of spirit, living, working, and learning traditional ways from Idlouk, a wise old half-Inuk hermit. It's an unlikely journey, but Napoli makes it a fascinating one, organically incorporating a wealth of detail about the Arctic and its human and non-human inhabitants. (Fiction. 9+)