Synopsis
Jasmyn Williams is shocked and angry when her mother, a member of the Army Reserve, is called up for service during the Persian Gulf War. While Jas comes to understand that her mother has to do her job, she wonders, should a mother have a job that might require abandoning her children?
“Jasmyn’s ready for her big seventh-grade season in basketball . . . when her home life bounces out of control . . . There’s an emotional impact here that will resound with other youngsters making sacrifices.” – The Bulletin of the Center for Children’s Books
Horn Book
(Intermediate)
Jasmyn is looking to captaining the seventh-grade basketball team when her mother is called up from the army reserves to go to Saudi Arabia for the opening phase of the 1990 Persian Gulf War. Mead wisely keeps her canvas small, focusing on Jasmyn's adjustment to a newly chaotic life in her small Maine seacoast town. Basketball has to go on the back burner; just as bad, Mom's somewhat hapless boyfriend Jake has moved in to care for Jasmyn's baby brother, Andrew, and it often feels to Jasmyn as if she's doing all of the work. Jasmyn is a realistically prickly heroine as she balances worry about her mom with resentment at being left. The war itself is entirely offstage, conveyed only through Mom's brief letters and phone calls; what matters here is what happens at home, and Mead paints an entirely convincing and involving picture. r.s.