Kaleidoscope Eyes is set during the Vietnam War. Writing up a short summary of these books has left me feeling as though I cannot clearly communicate the many facets of either story adequately.
While it may seem easier to compose a story with so few words, my thoughts after reading Three Rivers Rising by Jame Richards just a few days ago and Kaleidoscope Eyes by Jen Bryant today, is that writing a story with so few words may actually be more difficult. I was trying to explain to my daughter, who was quite interested in the layout as she was paging through it, how very interesting these books are. Would be “none” for adult readers.Kaleidoscope Eyes by Jen Bryant is the second novel in verse I've read in the past week. Rated: Mild there’s talk of drugs but none actually are taken. And, again, they have a kaleidoscopic effect: a lot of little pieces come together to make a nice story, which is really rather neat. The format also helps: it’s a novel in verse, and the way some of the poems reflect the mood of the characters or events is clever, but not distracting. And because of that, it becomes also a homage to freer times, when three 13-year-olds could go all over a town (and to other towns) without adults knowing more than just the bare minimum. But the primary focus of the story is the adventure and discovery of the kids. Those issues were a part of life in 1968 it would have felt odd not to have mentions of Martin Luther King’s or Robert Kennedy’s deaths.
Once the maps come into play, however, the issues fade to the background. It’s not heavy-handed, though, which I feared at the beginning. There isn’t an issue of the late 1960s that doesn’t earn a passing reference: racism - Lyza’s best friend Malcolm is African-American the Vietnam War and all that entails, from the fighting to the protests to the draft hippies - Lyza’s older sister Denise and her boyfriend Harry certainly qualify and drugs - at one point, Lyza’s father thinks she’s doing drugs, even though what she’s really doing is digging up buried treasure. I was intrigued by the title: what would a book that quotes a phrase from a Beatles song be about? Turns out that it’s much like a kaleidoscope: a lot of little bits and pieces of a lot of things working together to make a patchwork story. I have no idea what I expected when I pulled this off the shelf. With her two best friends, Malcolm and Carolann, Lyza unravels the mystery of the maps to discover that famed “reluctant pirate” Captain William Kidd possibly buried treasure right in their town. So, when her grandpa dies, it’s almost more than she can bear.Įxcept … Grandpa left something just for Lyza: three maps and a mystery to solve. It’s been two years since her mother disappeared, and with the Vietnam War raging, boys in her small South Jersey town are coming home in coffins more than she’d like. It’s the summer of 1968, and 13-year-old Lyza Bradley has had enough of death and abandonment.
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