Underdog - Softcover

Readers sense Sachs's empathy for young people in The Bear's House, Veronica Ganz and her other unforgettable novels. Here we meet new people the author persuades us to laugh and cry with and sometimes scorn. Isabelle (Izzy) Cummings tells about her life when her father dies and she's rejected by the stepmothers he had married and divorced after the death of his first wife, Izzy's mother. Uncle Harry Cummings arrives to decide Izzy's future and takes her from the East to San Francisco, where his kind but reserved wife tells Izzy she will like boarding school when the next term begins, dashing the orphan's hopes of welcome into a permanent home. Izzy concentrates instead on finding the puppy, Gus, she remembers her father giving away before moving with her to New York, years earlier. The secret mission involves Izzy with strange characters in odd pockets of the city. Like lost Gus, Izzy is an "underdog," passed around instead of loved, but this isn't a sad story. The poignant moments are balanced by very funny incidents and the surprise finale is sheer delight.
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Grade 4-6 Eleven-year-old Izzy's father dies, leaving her an orphan. Neither of her stepmothers wants to take her in, so she is sent off to San Francisco to an aunt and uncle she barely knows. When she learns of their plans to send her to boarding school, Izzy assumes that no one wants her and concentrates all of her energy toward finding Gus, a dog she vaguely remembers but loved seven years ago. Her efforts to locate Gus are convoluted, to say the least, and it strains one's credibility to imagine that an 11-year-old could have the wherewithal to follow up so many leads in her search. The characters are never really fleshed out, except for animal lover Mrs. Firestone, and although the story is told in the first person, readers learn remarkably little about Izzy. Her whining tone and obsession with finding Gus dominate the story; add to this an abrupt denouement, and the total is a book which is not up to Sachs' previous work. Try Misty and Me (Scribners, 1979) by Barbara Girion instead.Kathleen Brachmann, Highland Park Public Library, Ill.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.