Sarah With an H - Hardcover

Marti has spent her whole life in LaMond, Iowa; her widowed mother chose to raise her there because it's a "good town where people are honest and care about each other." But when a Jewish family moves in, prejudices kindle quickly. Marti and her friends envy Sarah?she's beautiful, gets A pluses, earns a coveted starting spot on the school basketball team, lives in the best house in town and is almost saintly in her tolerance of the girls' hostilities. She is too good to ring true, just as a number of the anti-Semitic characters are too dumb to be believed ("They don't believe in Christmas!" one girl says. "They have something called Canoeka or something like that. It's Indian, I think"). Writing as Irwin (So Long at the Fair), the team of Ann Irwin and the late Lee Hadley captures many small-town Iowa enthusiasms, like the passion for girls' basketball or the summer Karnival. But this success is annulled by the number of false notes struck here, from Marti's frequently disingenous narration to overdetermined subplots involving a controversy about developing lakefront property or stolen antique dolls. The worst mistake, however, may be the ambiguous approach to defining prejudice: in this account, it seems to be chiefly crude gestures, epithets and stereotyping, not the subtle and more pervasive casting of groups of individuals as "different." Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Marti, who has lived in the small town of LaMond, Iowa, all her life, is hesitant when a teacher directs her to show a new girl around. Sarah, a smart, accomplished, pretty girl, seems not to notice Marti's lack of enthusiasm, leading Marti to observe, ``There's nothing worse than having someone think you've been nice when you haven't intended to be.'' There are complications with Sarah's arrival: She is Jewish, and Marti witnesses incidents of cruelty and prejudice directed toward Sarah and her family over the ensuing weeks. Even Marti feels ``suspicious, somehow'' and views the newcomer as ``not one of us.'' Marti calculates in a self-interested manner how both the new girl's presence as well as her other classmates' abilities and troubles will affect the performance of their basketball team. Thus, the issue of prejudice intrudes into her everyday concerns. Readers will be hooked by the realistic portrayal of vital issues and by the thorough presentation of such thought-provoking themes as inclusion and exclusion. Although the scenes leading up to a climactic basketball game are glossed over, the action lends excitement to the novel and includes a turn of events--Sarah sustains injury but doggedly keeps playing--reminiscent of the drama in the recent Olympics. (Fiction. 9-12) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.