Reviews

Dogtag Summer by Elizabeth Partridge

iceangel32's review

5.0

This was a great book. I may have ben a children's book, but it was worth the read. It was a really good story about a girl who does not know about her past. She has bits and pieces of memories that come to her from her life in Vietnam before she was adopted to an American family. Her father was a war vet and her best friend's hippie family calls her adopted father a baby killer. Not only is Tracy trying to make sense of her life she is also dealing with a rocky situation with her best friend. Great coming of age book.

thebrainlair's review

4.0

There are things you want to forget but you can't. You can bury them but they always come to light. Thinking of going into a new school with new people triggers memories and questuons Tracy didn't know she had. Over the course of summer, the past resurfaces leaving her with questions about where she belongs, if anywhere. Would go well with All The Broken Pieces by Burg and Inside Out and Back Again by Lai.

abigailbat's review

4.0

Tracy has been in America for five years now, but she still doesn't fit in and lately has been having flashbacks of the life in Vietnam that she can't quite remember. Tension from the Vietnam War permeates her family, too, as her adoptive father struggles to deal with his own army nightmares. When Tracy and her best friend Stargazer find dogtags in her father's tool shed and her father freaks out about it, she wonders if the dogtags might be a key to her hidden past. This dogtag summer will be a time of change for Tracy, just turning twelve years old and about to start Junior High, and for her entire family.

Lush descriptions of the California coast meld with lush descriptions of the Vietnamese jungle as Tracy alternates between her present (1980) and her memories of the past. The tension between Vietnam veterans and war protesters is shown in Tracy's friendship with Stargazer and her relationship with his hippie parents. There are lots of issues throughout the book, but they're woven seamlessly together and never felt like too much.

While the book might need some scaffolding about the Vietnam War, this is a poignant story that teens will relate to. It's about coming of age and feeling in-between in so many ways. I'd not only recommend this to fans of similar stories like Home of the Brave by Katherine Applegate, Shooting the Moon by Frances O'Roark Dowell, and Inside Out and Back Again by Thanhha Lai, but I'd also recommend it to girls devouring Judy Blume's coming of age stories.

buuboobaby's review

5.0

Very moving read about a young girl struggling to understand who she is. Tracy is a likable character experiencing a convincing emotional roller coaster after she finds an old ammo box in the garage. Like Pandora's box, once she opens it, life just isn't the same as it used to be, and it strains her relationship with her adoptive parents and her best friend. She has lost all sense of herself, and it has her lashing out at everyone in her fear and confusion. Great book!

rebecita's review

4.0

Short and sweet coming of age story. Fantastic to see two stories with Asian-American protagonists in the CYRM this year! (Though both are by white authors... I love this medal program but it's inconsistent about embracing diverse books. Are we representing California young readers or what??)