Stephen E

My favorite line from the book appears in Chapter 53 and is made in reference to the Korean military, who "don't believe in mistakes. But every pencil has an eraser." In a set of circumstances, some caused by the main character's anger and errors in judgment and others created through sets of random (often absurd) situations, "Bucky" is ordered to serve his mandatory year in the Korean military. The problems with that being,
(a) he has lived in the United States (Washington state) his entire life not having been in Korea since early childhood and never having learned the culture or language, and
(b) he doesn't believe he is a Korean citizen due to being brought to the US by his father, who paid an American girlfriend to "raise him in a better place" and then returned to Korea.

For me, the best parts of this book are the references to outdated immigration policies and layers of bureaucracies that even the family's lawyers cannot defend against and Bucky's first-hand accounts of being stuck in limbo between the two countries—not really a citizen of either but claimed by an entity that really only counts him as a duty-bound body.

I wish those parts of Bucky's story could have been told against a different backdrop, but the author uses analogies with and comparisons to American football to make many points and justify others. He also uses often-ludicrous, ill-fitting experiences in the Korean military to demonstrate roadblocks to Bucky's American return.

I do feel that the author did a good job of tying up an excess of loose ends by the book's end, and I felt that the main character's resolution was realistic—especially when set against his journey!

I would recommend this book for more advanced YA readers and, especially, for readers looking to filter through a long story in order to find a better understanding of the personal costs of immigration on children as well as the difficult positions that undocumented youth—particularly children of undocumented parents, or DACA Dreamers—who have never lived in their parents' homeland are forced to face.

I found Margaret Verble's novel Stealing to be enjoyable on many levels, however, I particularly enjoyed the easy-flowing exchange of dialog and narrative that gradually unveiled multiple layers of this story. The main storyteller, "Kit", starts us on that journey as a young girl who is living a mostly carefree life of the times. While her mother has died, her father provides for her as a typical working father in the 1950s would have-- with all his soul but not a lot of personal involvement or emotional support.

Kit wanders, fishes, daydreams, and overthinks as any child will when left on their own, and after a new resident moves in nearby, a natural curiosity leads her to investigate and meet the neighbor. Sadly, when actions are misconstrued and rumors are spread, Kit is forced to see that a larger world view exists-- and has existed for her Native American family over many, many years. The author's use of "flashback" and current happenings might ordinarily be confusing, but Verble leads us flawlessly and knowingly back and forth between the two, revealing a back story that illuminates Kit's current situation.

I would recommend this novel to advanced YA readers, followers of historical fiction (though I haven't been able to pinpoint to what degree the book is actually "historical"), and those interested in remembering how family and community life in the middle of our last century was for many of us.