From: Ginny Moore Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Fri, 16 Mar 2007 11:18:44 -0500

Although I'm waiting "in line" to read THE PULL OF THE OCEAN, I've read THE KILLER'S TEARS by Anne-Laure Bondoux, translated from the French by Y. Maudet. (U.S. publisher: Delacorte Press).
  I'm impressed - perhaps haunted - by this unique page-turner set in Chile. THE KILLER'S TEARS features a boy who needs both a physical and an emotional home. The narrative unfolds in several distinct and quite different locales, each with dramatic characters who step in & out of the plot.
  Regardless of how readers might choose to identify its narrative form, as a reader of THE KILLER'S TEARS I felt I was in another region of the world. That's essential for Batchelder Award eligibility. Among other requirements the Batchelder Award Criteria state that "The book's reader should be able to sense that the book came from another country."
(Batchelder Manual, June, 2006). Not only must a "Batchelder book" have been translated into English for the first time, and published in this English translation in the U.S. before it's published in English anywhere else, it must provide the sense that the book originated in from another nation. I assume that's true of the two other books honored by the Batchelder Award process this year, as well.
  Cordially, Ginny
Received on Fri 16 Mar 2007 11:18:44 AM CDT