Review: Dave at Night by Gail Carson Levine

This is the second Gail Carson Levine I’ve read (the first was Ella Enchanted which is lovely and great and way better than that dumb movie), and let me just say that she doesn’t let down on the endings. They’re never complex, they’re never hard to grasp, but they’re simple and perfect and plausible.

Her portrait of 1920s New York was about as accurate as I could require, and filled with the sepia settings of theJewish poor and the glitter of the rich and black. Having read The King of Mulberry Street in the past month, too, I found familiarity, even though the stories are entirely different. Neither of the books really seemed to move, even though they were both well-written and technically good; maybe that’s what people expect when they pick up an historical. I, for one, don’t.

I loved the cameos by Langston Hughes and W. E. B. DuBois, and the glimpses into black Harlem were great. I’ll be searching out a new “type” of book now, one that gives me more insight into that time and place.