An enchanting tale of love.
Two 12-year-olds find the friendship they’ve craved and unite to save their magical town.
Winifred has grown up in Honeycrisp Hill, Rhode Island, where her family is despised, thanks to her biological mother’s curse. The only place she feels at home is the family bakery, but as the cost of enchanted ingredients rises, business is suffering. Wini’s plan to help involves executing a slightly illegal love spell from her family’s grimoire. Her first goal: finding her dad the perfect man. Meanwhile, Kaliope is from Boston, where she couldn’t practice magic. She welcomes the move to Honeycrisp Hill, hoping it’ll mean more time with her frequently absent father, but the grandfather she knew nothing about shows up to help them reopen the town’s haunted bookstore. Next, an Enchantment Agency officer arrives to investigate “a wickedness that’s been called to town.” Despite a bumpy start, Wini and Kal become friends; together they try to banish the wickedness and even play matchmaker between their dads. YA author Dow’s middle-grade debut is brimming with magic—and enticing recipes for readers to try. She holds space for the loneliness that both girls experience and for Kal’s struggles with anxiety. Her superb worldbuilding and the authentic dialogue between the quirky, beguiling characters will draw readers in, while the heart-pounding tension and strong pacing will lead them to the satisfying conclusion. Wini and her family are Black; Kal’s dad is white, and her birth mom is from Chile.
An enchanting tale of love. (author’s note) (Fantasy. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2023
ISBN: 9781250829115
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2023
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
Heartening and hopeful, a love letter to black male youth grasping the desires within them, absorbing the worlds around...
Cooler-than-cool newcomer Styx Malone takes the more-sheltered brothers Caleb and Bobby Gene on a mischievous, path-altering, summer adventure of a lifetime as they embrace the extraordinary possibilities beyond the everyday in rural Indiana.
Readers may think an adventure such as they’ll find here wouldn’t be possible in the present day; this story takes place outside, where nature, know-how, creativity, and curiosity rule. Creeks, dirt roads, buried treasures, and more make up the landscape in Sutton, Indiana. Younger brother Caleb narrates, letting readers know from the outset that he’s tired of his dad’s racially tinged determination that they be safely ordinary: “I don’t want to be ordinary. I want to be…the other thing.” With Styx Malone around, Caleb and Bobby Gene will sure figure out what that “other thing” can become. The three black adolescents are enchanted with the miracle of the Great Escalator Trade, the mythic one-thing-leads-to-another bartering scheme that just might get them farther from Sutton than they’ve ever dreamed. As they get deeper and deeper into cahoots with Styx, they begin to notice that Styx harbors some secret ambitions of his own, further twisting this grand summer journey. “How do you move through the world knowing that you’re special, when no one else can see it?” begs the soul of this novel.
Heartening and hopeful, a love letter to black male youth grasping the desires within them, absorbing the worlds around them, striving to be more otherwise than ordinary. Please share. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5247-1595-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Wendy Lamb/Random
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2018
PERSPECTIVES
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