A story of perseverance and love.
Onyx has a secret.
It’s 1970, and following the death of his grandmother, Onyx, a 12-year-old Black boy, is left living alone with his mother, who has early onset dementia. Fearing losing Mama, too, he keeps her condition a secret from everyone and instead vows to make sure that he keeps up the show of everything being OK at home. His days are filled with completing chores, leaving sticky notes for Mama to read when she wakes up, attending Catholic school, and catching up with his cousins and other relatives when he can. Onyx relies on the knowledge passed on to him by his grandmother to manage their Alexandria, Virginia, home—shopping for groceries and preparing simple meals for himself and his mother. As her condition begins to worsen, however, he desperately tries to find a way to help Mama get her memories back. Facing the looming threat of a home visit by social workers, Onyx takes bigger and bigger risks in his attempts to return his mother to her former self. Written in verse through the eyes of a child, the novel tackles complex topics honestly yet hopefully. As readers follow Onyx in his endeavors to help his mother, they’re also given a glimpse into being a young Black boy who, for all his troubles in life, has just as many joyful moments with his family and friends.
A story of perseverance and love. (author’s note) (Verse historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9781250908780
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 19, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2024
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings.
A loquacious, lovable dog narrates the challenges of shelter life as he longs for a home.
Friendly three-legged Chance is the perfect guide to Dogtown, a shelter that houses both warmblooded and robot dogs. In fact, she’s “Management’s lucky charm,” roaming freely without being confined to a cage and leaving kibble for her mouse friend. Life is pretty good. But she still yearns for reunification with her family and, like many of the living pups, harbors suspicion of her robot counterparts, who are convenient and more easily adoptable but lacking in personality. When Metal Head, an oddly engineered e-dog, bonds with a child during a shelter reading program, Chance’s assumptions about heartless robot dogs are upended. As Chance connects with Metal Head, the two make a brief escape into the wider world, and Chance learns a familiar lesson: Everyone longs for a place to belong. Memories of Chance’s happy home loom large in her mind: Easy days with the Bessers, a sweet Black family, were disrupted by a neglectful dogsitter, the accident that cost Chance her leg, and Chance’s flight in search of safety. Chance’s chatty narrative style includes flashbacks, vignettes about fellow shelter pets, and thoughtful observations, for example, about the “boohoos,” or sad new arrivals. The story offers many moments of laughter and reflection, all greatly enhanced by West’s utterly charming grayscale illustrations of irresistible pooches.
Eminently readable and appealing; will tug at dog-loving readers’ heartstrings. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2023
ISBN: 9781250811608
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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
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