From the Publisher
Awards and Praise for All the Broken Pieces:
Jefferson Cup award winner
Booklist Editors' Choice
ALA Best Books for Young Adults
IRA Notable Book for a Global Society
ALA Popular Paperback for Young Adults
*"[A] stirring debut novel . . . will make readers want to rush to the end and then return to the beginning again to make connections between past, present, friends and enemies."—Booklist, starred review
*"The verse form carries highly charged emotions and heavy content with elegiac simplicity." —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
*"Using spare free verse, first-time novelist Burg beautifully evokes the emotions of a Vietnamese adoptee as he struggles to come to terms with his past." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"...the story is a lovely, moving one." —School Library Journal
Awards and Praise for Serafina's Promise:
Starred review from Kirkus Reviews and School Library Journal
Kirkus Best Book of the Year
Parents' Choice Gold Award winner
School Library Journal Best Books of the Year
New York Public Library 100 Books for Giving and Sharing
The Herald-Sun Wilde Award for Longer books, Middle grade novel
Cybils Awards Finalists, Middle Grade Fiction
NAACP Image Awards Outstanding Literary Work-Youth/Teens nominee
ALA Notable Book
ALA Notable Trade Book in the Field of Social Studies
Michigan Great Lakes Great Books Award nominee
Bank Street College Children's Book Committee - Best Children's Books of the Year
Americas Award, Commended Title
DECEMBER 2016 - AudioFile
Narrator Bahni Turpin embraces the emotions of 9-year-old Grace while delivering the cadences of Burg’s novel in verse. Grace’s mother tries to prepare her daughter for working in the Big House, cautioning her to keep her eyes down and her mouth shut. But how can Grace’s mother truly ready her blue-eyed, light-skinned daughter for the hateful Missus? In depicting Grace’s encounters with the cold-hearted Missus, Turpin captures the child’s visceral fear. When the Missus decides to sell Grace’s family, Grace remembers what she heard growing up—“You hear ‘auction,’ ‘n’ you run!” As the family flees to the Great Dismal Swamp, Turpin dramatically portrays how Grace counters heartbreak with heroism and shame with a spirited sense of self. S.W. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2016-06-22
The author of Serafina's Promise (2013) returns with another lyrical novel in verse. When Grace turns 9, she is forced to leave the daily work of helping Aunt Sara tend her baby brothers and their garden, the daily joy of seeing Mama and Uncle Jim come home each night from the fields. Unlike the rest of her enslaved family, Grace has light skin and blue eyes. (The fact that her father must have been white, with all that implies, is never made explicit.) Her coloring—possibly light enough to pass—makes her more desirable for a house slave in the Missus' and Master's eyes, so Grace must work in the plantation kitchen and even serve at the table. The cook, Aunt Tempie, seems to bow to all of Missus' demands with a compliance Grace can't emulate—though Grace works hard, she sometimes lets her true feelings slip. Missus finally decides that "bringin Grace's family / to the auction block / might finally teach Grace / who she is and / where she belongs." Grace reacts with courage and resourcefulness, urging her family to flee to the swamps and ensuring they won't be caught. Told through Grace's eyes in Southern rhythms that approach dialect with a poet's careful sensibility, the story unfolds with a combination of historical precision, honesty, and adventure. Burg describes her research, based in part on narratives of the formerly enslaved collected by the Federal Writers Project, in the backmatter. Beautifully done. (Historical fiction. 9-12)
