Jakarta Missing

by Jane Kurtz

Overview

Dakar is scared. When her family left East Africa to spend a year or two in Cottonwood, North Dakota, Dakar's older sister, Jakarta, was adamant about staying behind. Now Jakarta is all by herself in Kenya...and she's missing.

It's terrible to go through life cringing, sure that at any minute a blow is going to come from somewhere. Dakar doesn't want to worry, but she can't help it. What if Jakarta was in the middle of a Nairobi bombing? What if Mom gets caught by hoodies and forced back into that place when Jakarta isn't even there to help? What if Dad decides to go off to save lives and is seized by some mysterious disease? If Dakar were able to do three really brave things, would that be enough to keep her family together?

Almost everything in Cottonwood, North Dakota, requires bravery from a girl who has grown up in Kenya, Ethiopia, Egypt, and Senegal. The possibility of a new friend, navigating a new school, and preparing for snow—the first Dakar will ever see—is the least of it. Jakarta is missing...when she's home and when she's not. And for Jakarta, Dakar will battle the universe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062239266
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	10/23/2012
Sold by:	HARPERCOLLINS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	272
File size:	760 KB
Age Range:	8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Jane Kurtz knows a lot about moving. She was born in Portland, Oregon, but when she was two years old her parents moved their family to Ethiopia to work for the Presbyterian Church there. Jane Kurtz is the author of novels, picture books, and chapter books. After living in North Dakota (where she survived a natural disaster), Colorado, Illinois, and Kansas, she moved back to Portland, Oregon, where she now lives with her husband, the Reverend Leonard L. Goering, H.R.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter One

Dakar stood at the top of the stairs and held her breath. No voices. No music. No rustling pages. She wanted...the click of a fingernail clipper. The tiniest creak of a chair sending little splinters into the silence. No. Nothing.

She clutched her throat melodramatically. Deadly cholera had swept through the house while she was asleep. She was the only survivor. Nothing to do but go down...into the valley of dry bones.

"Stop it, Dakar," she told herself. "You're scaring me." She grabbed on to the railing. Was this what books called a banister? She'd always wondered, reading those books, what it would be like to slide down a banister. In her imagination it had been a little like flying. Now, staring down at the polished wood, she felt stupid with fear.

"It is a poor life in which there is no fear." Dad had that pinned on a scrap of paper above his desk. And he said it to her one time -- the afternoon the elephant charged them. Dad also thought that if you gave in, even once, to things like fear and injustice and cruelty, they would get a toehold and come back the next time double strong.

All right. A banister couldn't possibly be as scary as an elephant. Dakar closed her eyes and scooted herself onto the railing. But what if she slid off halfway down and split her lip? What if she went off the end so hard she sprained her ankle? She hastily slid back off. "You're such a worry wart," her big sister, Jakarta, would say. "Dakar, the worrymeister." By some kind of magic, Jakarta seemed to have inherited 100 percent of Dad's risk genes.

Thinking about Jakarta made Dakar seasick with longing so that she had to sit down on the topstep and put her hands on either side to steady herself, still surprised to feel carpet there. "Isn't this luxurious?" Mom had said the first day they walked into the house. "We've never had carpet before." She'd stretched out flat in the middle of the living room, laughing as she tickled her palms with carpet strands. But Dakar missed the cool, dark floors of the Nairobi house. She missed the geckos, like ghost tongues flicking and licking up the walls. She wasn't even sure she knew how to make friends with a two-story house. More than anything else, of course, she missed Jakarta.

How could Jakarta have decided to stay in Kenya? Maybe ... Dakar chewed her fingernail thoughtfully, sadly ... was Jakarta sick of always having to take care of a worrymeister little sister? She glanced up at the banister. Okay. She'd do it. She could become less of a wart, she just knew it.

"Dakar, you think too much," Jakarta always said.

"Don't think, don't think," Dakar told herself as she climbed onto the banister again. She didn't dare look down.

She let go. Her stomach whooshed up so far she could taste it, and then she flew off the end, staggered a few steps, and stumbled forward. She landed right in front of the dining room table. Mom, who always sat at the table and read in the mornings, was not there.

Dakar stood up and rubbed her knees. She knew they'd grow big black-and-blue bruises, and she felt a slight tingling of pride. She'd done it -- for Jakarta.

Where was Mom? She felt a tingling of nervousness. "Dakar's famous overactive imagination is at it again," Jakarta would say. But it really was a mysterious morning, wasn't it? She cautiously moved to the back door. Her father was chopping wood. His arms rose and fell, and for a second Dakar thought of women pounding corn. He was singing a mournful Celtic tune, not one of the sea chanties or West African songs he used to sing all the time.

Dakar watched him warily. Hadn't Dad sung this very song when he was making waffles on the morning he told them they were going to leave Kenya? "We've decided it might be time to spend a year or two in The States." he'd said, reaching for Mom's hand over the mango syrup. "We'll be living only one long day's drive from where your mother grew up. Hey, we've explored the world...now let's explore the land of ten thousand lakes and the land of the flickertail."

Jakarta had instantly said, "No. I'm not going." She had at least fifteen reasons, she said, starting with not being able to make friends in the U.S. Jakarta had said the letters very distinctly. "Youuu. Essss."

Dakar had wanted to say, "I won't go, either," but she desperately wanted the four of them together, and she was pretty sure Jakarta would change her mind. So, instead, she'd said, "But what will you do?"

"I'll write articles about all my African research," Dad said cheerfully. "Something I've been putting off for years. We've picked a town not far from both the University of North Dakota and a branch of the University of Minnesota, so I'll have resources." He laughed his rumbling laugh. "It also has an airport thirty minutes away in case I need to get out of town fast."

Dakar sighed. But Jakarta hadn't changed her mind. So here she was, and the whole family wasn't together, anyway, because here Jakarta wasn't.

Suddenly Dad looked up, stopped right in the middle of a mournful line, and waved. Then he bent, scooped up an armful of wood, and walked toward her, smiling. She had always thought that his smile was bedazzling sunlight and that if she could only get close enough to it, she could get warm and never worry, worry, worry about things again. When he got inside the door, she ran to him and put both her arms around one of his, leaning her head against his shoulder. His beard smelled of incense, and his shoulder smelled of soap and sweat. "Getting some breakfast?" he asked, holding her back so he could look down into her face....

Jakarta Missing. Copyright © by Jane Kurtz. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

Editorial Reviews

Ambitious and complex, Kurtz's (Faraway Home) novel doesn't ultimately succeed, but offers a heady blend of universally relevant insight and an appreciation of the exotic. Raised in Africa, 12-year-old Dakar comes "home" with her parents to spend a year or two in North Dakota. She misses her older sister, Jakarta, who has insisted on staying behind at boarding school, and who has always been the leader. Her fears about her new environment are made all the more painful by her father's disdain for fear not even an elephant attack scares him. Bookish in a way entirely credible for a shy, expatriate child, Dakar thinks about literary and biblical characters and wishes she, too, could fashion her own quest. "What would Odysseus do?" she asks herself at one point. Kurtz captivates when describing Africa, be it the grace of the wilderness or the chaos of "Nairobbery," as Dakar calls it, and she astutely conjures adolescent dialogue and thoughts. But she overloads her plot. Jakarta is forced to join the family after her school is bombed; shortly after her return, their mom goes off to nurse a long-lost aunt (who doesn't have a telephone); and, without consulting his still-absent wife, their father rushes off to Guatemala to work with earthquake victims (no phones there, either), leaving his daughters alone for weeks. Multiple subplots involve a girls' basketball team, a painful family secret and a cook at Dakar's school who talks in aphorisms. Even with its solid beginning, the novel simply cannot sustain so much activity. Ages 10-up. (Apr.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Gr 5-9-Sixth-grader Dakar struggles to cope with her family's move from Africa, where her father worked to help the needy and gloried in adventure, to North Dakota, where she feels just as much an outsider as she did in Kenya, Egypt, Ethiopia, and boarding school. Her beloved older sister, Jakarta, stays behind; when forced to join them, she is first angry and then distant, immersed in high school basketball. When their mother and father leave suddenly and separately to do good elsewhere, the two girls manage on their own, but Dakar feels bereft. A winter storm provokes the emotional crisis that forces her to call for help. Kurtz convincingly portrays both the bewildering mix of emotions that accompany an expatriate's return "home" and the complications of family life when adults and young adults have different goals and needs. Dakar and Jakarta and, to a lesser extent, their parents are developed characters with realistically complex motivations and less-than-perfect understandings of one another and of themselves. The questions Dakar poses about doing good, and her admirable recall of appropriate Bible quotations, add flavor to the story. However, Jakarta, an adopted child of Irani/African-American/ Japanese heritage, worries, "Is there going to be anyone here who looks like me?" but readers don't see her coping with the fact that there isn't. Although some may be left feeling that the story changes direction too often and loses its way, other readers will be caught up in it and will devour the details of exotic foreign and everyday family and school lives.-Kathleen Isaacs, Edmund Burke School, Washington, DC Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

School Library Journal

In this slow-moving contemporary novel, a sixth-grader contrasts her new life in North Dakota with her childhood in Africa, while her family struggles with their differing hopes for the future. When Dakar and her parents move to Cottonwood, North Dakota, for a year, leaving her older sister Jakarta in Africa, nothing seems right to the girl. Her parents, both of whom remain largely one-dimensional characters, only contribute to her worries. Her charismatic father longs to be elsewhere, working with Doctors without Borders or helping refugees. Her mother, who grew up in North Dakota, seems distant and ambivalent about being back. Dakar longs for her sister, but when Jakarta reluctantly joins them, the happy family Dakar hopes for still doesn't emerge. Instead her mother goes away to help an ailing aunt, not realizing that Dakar's father leaves shortly after her to do rescue work in Guatemala. While high-schooler Jakarta devotes her time to basketball and leads her team to a series of wins, Dakar spends far too much time alone with no adults to care for her. Dakar's lyrical memories of Africa help sustain her, but may prove confusing to readers unfamiliar with the countries she mentions. Similarly, her frequent allusions to the Bible, Russian rulers, and The Water Babies will be more distracting than meaningful for many readers. Kurtz's (Faraway Home, 2000, etc.) love for both Africa and North Dakota comes across clearly, but she has woven too many strands into her novel without strong enough characterizations to hold them together. (Fiction. 11-14)

Kirkus Reviews