Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Braid Deborah Stevenson Frost, Helen The Braid. Foster/Farrar, 200695p ISBN 0-374-30962-0$16.00 R Gr. 6-10 When the mid-nineteenth-century Highland Clearances force a Scottish family out of their island home, oldest sister Sarah slips away to join her grandmother on a smaller nearby island rather than cross the Atlantic, while the rest of the family departs for Canada, hoping to find family and a living in Cape Breton. The terrible crossing takes the lives of Sarah's father and two of the younger children, leaving only Mother, fourteen-year-old Jeannie, and the baby William to face the privations when they arrive to discover Cape Breton struck by scarcity. Back in Scotland, Sarah falls in love with Murdo Campbell, but he's forcibly shipped off to Canada before they can marry, leaving her pregnant and unsure of her future. The braid of the title refers to the interwoven hair of Sarah and Jeannie, a piece of which each sister holds and treasures. That braid is explored further in the poetic structure of this verse novel, which creates its own innovative verse form: Sarah and Jeannie alternate narration, in unrhymed lines syllabically based on the speaker's age; each poem subtly relates to the verses around it through shared opening and closing words, while praise poems between the girls' accounts also interweave. Though complicated to describe, the forms are unobtrusive in the reading, quietly underpinning the narrative poems; Frost is a master at making language fit unforced into meter, so the narrative poems read easily, with a prosy spontaneity but a pulsing rhythm underneath (the more abstract brief praise poems will likely be skipped by readers looking for story rather than lyricism). Between its broken-token variant and melodramatic elements, the story tilts toward the sentimental, but that's helpful in creating a compelling story that will see poetry-shy readers through; they'll also be intrigued by the parallel lives of the two sisters and the results of their different life paths. Notes explain the poetic form and a bit about island life, language, and history. Copyright © 2006 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.108 | 0.048 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".