After 12-year-old Renny Sholto defends the new Chinese boy, Wong Gum Zi, in his Colorado mining community in 1881, the boys both become the targets of abuse from adults and kids. The teacher doesn't want to allow Chinks into the schoolhouse. Even Renny's father attacks him for being soft hearted (You shame me, acting so) and warns Renny that those heathens will take away the jobs from the Irish. The plot creaks a bit, with a cute bird that steals jewelry, and Zi is never more than the perfect victim, solemn, strong, and brilliant. However, the action is fast and the dramatic confrontations show that the prejudice is rooted in ignorance and fear. Renny's Irish immigrant family is drawn with realism and sympathy, and so is the rough frontier town, especially the one-room schoolhouse. Many readers will feel for Renny, whose father wants a tough, brawling son and tries to drive out kindness in the boy he loves. Read this with Spinelli's Wringer and the other books about bullies in the Read-alikes column in this issue. (Reviewed Sept. 1, 1997)

In a Colorado mining camp in the 1880s, twelve-year-old Renny goes against his roughneck Irish father to befriend a Chinese boy. The setting is vivid, especially in showing the tensions between the established European immigrant miners and the Chinese newcomers and between the mine owners and workers, but many of the characterizations are shallow, and too many twentieth-century sensibilities intrude.

In a novel that is a near-perfect combination of brutal realism and piercing lyricism, the kindhearted son of a brawling miner becomes a pariah in his lawless frontier mining town when he befriends a Chinese immigrant boy, Zi. <p> In a novel that is a near-perfect combination of brutal realism and piercing lyricism, the kindhearted son of a brawling miner becomes a pariah in his lawless frontier mining town when he befriends a Chinese immigrant boy, Zi. Renny's friends have become his enemies, and both he and Zi are beaten; Renny's father wants his son to become a two-fisted fighter, and forbids the friendship. A strike over the arrest of the local priest leads to inflamed tempers, a riot is brewing, and Renny's efforts to protect his friend may cost him his family. Blakeslee maintains a clipped pace but also develops a clear picture of a frontier town and Renny's internal struggles, caught between his father and his conscience. Among the major characters there are no cardboard villains; Blakeslee, who has an eye out for the good to be found in everyone, comes perilously close to turning Zi and his family into saints, but skirts it by showing the boy's empathy, which he expresses in his journal. A powerful story of good vs. good intentions. (Fiction. 10-14)</p> "