A heartfelt story about loss and connection.
This contemporary novel is narrated by an unexpected storyteller: an old apartment building in a gentrifying neighborhood.
The run-down, red-brick Odenburgh building chronicles the intertwined stories of its residents as they work to try to save it from demolition. Among the building’s diverse group of tenants is 11-year-old Prue Laroe, a freckle-faced girl with “poufy” and “frizzy” black hair. Prue is mourning the death of Lina, one of her sisters, and carrying unanswered questions about the traumatic accident that took her life. She clings to the building, using one of its landline telephones as a confessional. When the Odenburgh flicks its lights on and off, Prue interprets it as communication from Lina: She believes that her sister wants her to try to save the building. Prue meets and works with Lewis, a lanky boy from across the street who has binoculars, too-short pants, and his own secret grief. The building continues to interact with Prue and Lewis, turning off the air conditioning and water and stopping elevators to manipulate people’s movements and bring the quirky (though sometimes caricatured) characters together so the kids can get to know them and persuade them to lend their support. This contemplative story explores themes of community, resilience, and healing through poetic prose that’s infused with heartache and wonder. Neither Prue’s nor Lewis’ racial identities are explicitly stated.
A heartfelt story about loss and connection. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: March 25, 2025
ISBN: 9781250326980
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: Dec. 14, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2025
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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