Brooklyn Bridge
A Novel
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- £8.99
Publisher Description
Karen Hesse has achieved many honors for her more than twenty books over the course of her award-winning career: the Newbery Medal, the Scott O'Dell Historical Fiction Award, the MacArthur Fellowship "Genius" Award, and the Christopher Medal. Her novels burn with intensity, and keenly felt, deeply researched, and are memorable for their imagination and intelligence.
So it is with great pride and excitement that we present Karen Hesse's first novel in over five years: Brooklyn Bridge.
It's the summer of 1903 in Brooklyn and all fourteen-year-old Joseph Michtom wants is to experience the thrill, the grandeur, and the electricity of the new amusement park at Coney Island. But that doesn't seem likely. Ever since his parents—Russian immigrants—invented the stuffed Teddy Bear five months ago, Joseph's life has turned upside down. No longer do the Michtom's gather family and friends around the kitchen table to talk. No longer is Joseph at leisure to play stickball with the guys. Now, Joseph works. And complains. And falls in love. And argues with Mama and Papa. And falls out of love. And hopes. Joseph hopes he'll see Coney Island soon. He hopes that everything will turn right-side up again. He hopes his luck hasn't run out—because you never know.
Through all the warmth, the sadness, the frustration, and the laughter of one big, colorful family, Newbery Medalist Karen Hesse builds a stunning story of the lucky, the unlucky, and those in between, and reminds us that our lives—all our lives—are fragile, precious, and connected.
Brooklyn Bridge is a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Inspired by facts surrounding the inventors of the teddy bear, Newbery Medalist Hesse (Out of the Dust) applies her gift for narrative voice to this memorable story set in 1903 Brooklyn. Fourteen-year-old Joseph Michtom's parents, Jewish immigrants from Russia, are the envy of the neighborhood when their toy bears make them prosperous. The principal narrator, Joe, copes with the ironies of their fortune: "Now it's like I got some special kind of power. Only I'm not doing anything good with it." Resented by his former friends, Joe works in the bear business, gets crushes and longs to go to brand-new Coney Island. Interspersed throughout are brief profiles of street children who make their home under the Brooklyn Bridge, haunted by a ghost they refer to as the Radiant Boy. Deftly paced story lines about Joe's extended family indirectly raise questions about different types of bridges: those from the old country to America, those that cross generations, those that link the unlikeliest individuals. Not until the final chapters does Hesse produce the connection between Joseph and the street children with their ghost, and then the novel explodes with dark drama before its eerie but moving resolution. Ages 10 14.
