A story that will encourage readers to spread their wings.
Characters from Sax’s Picture Day (2023) try out something new.
Thirteen-year-old Alexandra Olsen has played rec league baseball for years. Now, as a seventh grader at Brinkley Middle School, she tries out for boys’ baseball. The new coach welcomes her, and Al is skilled enough to make the team, along with Julian Veras, her nonbinary friend from rec league. Meanwhile, classmate Milo Castillo finds the courage to join the art club, something that’s outside his comfort zone, and extroverted Viv Sullivan revives the Brinkley Beak, an old school mascot. When Al is interviewed on local TV for being the first girl ballplayer at Brinkley, it leads to dissent among her teammates; she copes by becoming overly demanding, which causes further friction. Sax does well at depicting a wide range of young people and validating a variety of interests and talents. Al is a fully realized character, and the issue of girls’ equity in sports will be inviting to readers who enjoy graphic novels such as Misty Wilson and David Wilson’s Play Like a Girl (2022) and Matt Tavares’ Hoops (2023). In a subplot, the Brinkley girls’ basketball team’s undefeated season is overlooked in the hubbub over Al’s presence on the boys’ baseball team. The art is very well done, especially the sports scenes shown from multiple points of view. Al is white; there’s racial diversity among the supporting cast.
A story that will encourage readers to spread their wings. (character sketches, author’s note, resources) (Graphic fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9780593306925
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs.
The Heffley family’s house undergoes a disastrous attempt at home improvement.
When Great Aunt Reba dies, she leaves some money to the family. Greg’s mom calls a family meeting to determine what to do with their share, proposing home improvements and then overruling the family’s cartoonish wish lists and instead pushing for an addition to the kitchen. Before bringing in the construction crew, the Heffleys attempt to do minor maintenance and repairs themselves—during which Greg fails at the work in various slapstick scenes. Once the professionals are brought in, the problems keep getting worse: angry neighbors, terrifying problems in walls, and—most serious—civil permitting issues that put the kibosh on what work’s been done. Left with only enough inheritance to patch and repair the exterior of the house—and with the school’s dismal standardized test scores as a final straw—Greg’s mom steers the family toward moving, opening up house-hunting and house-selling storylines (and devastating loyal Rowley, who doesn’t want to lose his best friend). While Greg’s positive about the move, he’s not completely uncaring about Rowley’s action. (And of course, Greg himself is not as unaffected as he wishes.) The gags include effectively placed callbacks to seemingly incidental events (the “stress lizard” brought in on testing day is particularly funny) and a lampoon of after-school-special–style problem books. Just when it seems that the Heffleys really will move, a new sequence of chaotic trouble and property destruction heralds a return to the status quo. Whew.
Readers can still rely on this series to bring laughs. (Graphic/fiction hybrid. 8-12)Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3903-3
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amulet/Abrams
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often...
A successful juvenile by the beloved New Yorker writer portrays a farm episode with an imaginative twist that makes a poignant, humorous story of a pig, a spider and a little girl.
Young Fern Arable pleads for the life of runt piglet Wilbur and gets her father to sell him to a neighbor, Mr. Zuckerman. Daily, Fern visits the Zuckermans to sit and muse with Wilbur and with the clever pen spider Charlotte, who befriends him when he is lonely and downcast. At the news of Wilbur's forthcoming slaughter, campaigning Charlotte, to the astonishment of people for miles around, spins words in her web. "Some Pig" comes first. Then "Terrific"—then "Radiant". The last word, when Wilbur is about to win a show prize and Charlotte is about to die from building her egg sac, is "Humble". And as the wonderful Charlotte does die, the sadness is tempered by the promise of more spiders next spring.
The three way chats, in which they are joined by other animals, about web spinning, themselves, other humans—are as often informative as amusing, and the whole tenor of appealing wit and pathos will make fine entertainment for reading aloud, too.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 1952
ISBN: 978-0-06-026385-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 14, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1952
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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