Warm and nuanced.
Newly diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, Will McKeachie has an explanation for his stomach issues and pain but a new set of problems.
A passionate center midfielder, he is heartbroken about an enforced break from soccer. Twelve-year-old Will soon becomes friends with Griffin Miller, a gay classmate who loves theater and video games, and begins to develop new interests and perspectives as he navigates his illness. He also faces issues he hadn’t previously encountered: recognizing that his friends veer into bullying and disregard his needs and questioning his own sexuality. Thoughtful, introverted Will’s first-person narration is often funny and takes time examining his daily life. His Georgia town and his Baptist church, in which his family is heavily involved, are realistic in their bigotry, but the people around Will are largely decent even when they fail in their intentions. The story takes an intersectional approach that avoids the perils of making Will’s disease and queerness lessons; his identities blend into each other in organic ways. But what is captured here most compellingly are the struggles of developing a chronic illness at a young age, borne from Eliopulos’ own experiences: the gulf between friends before and after diagnosis, well-meaning concern that becomes patronization, and rarely described specific frustrations of navigating a healthy world as a sick kid. As Will’s reality changes, he remains—and becomes—fully himself. Main characters read White.
Warm and nuanced. (author’s note, resources) (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 6, 2023
ISBN: 9780063228702
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Quill Tree Books/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 11, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
However the compelling fitness of theme and event and the apt but unexpected imagery (the opening sentences compare the...
At a time when death has become an acceptable, even voguish subject in children's fiction, Natalie Babbitt comes through with a stylistic gem about living forever.
Protected Winnie, the ten-year-old heroine, is not immortal, but when she comes upon young Jesse Tuck drinking from a secret spring in her parents' woods, she finds herself involved with a family who, having innocently drunk the same water some 87 years earlier, haven't aged a moment since. Though the mood is delicate, there is no lack of action, with the Tucks (previously suspected of witchcraft) now pursued for kidnapping Winnie; Mae Tuck, the middle aged mother, striking and killing a stranger who is onto their secret and would sell the water; and Winnie taking Mae's place in prison so that the Tucks can get away before she is hanged from the neck until....? Though Babbitt makes the family a sad one, most of their reasons for discontent are circumstantial and there isn't a great deal of wisdom to be gleaned from their fate or Winnie's decision not to share it.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1975
ISBN: 0312369816
Page Count: 164
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1975
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions.
An isolated class of misfits and a teacher on the edge of retirement are paired together for a year of (supposed) failure.
Zachary Kermit, a 55-year-old teacher, has been haunted for the last 27 years by a student cheating scandal that has earned him the derision of his colleagues and killed his teaching spirit. So when he is assigned to teach the Self-Contained Special Eighth-Grade Class—a dumping ground for “the Unteachables,” students with “behavior issues, learning problems, juvenile delinquents”—he is unfazed, as he is only a year away from early retirement. His relationship with his seven students—diverse in temperament, circumstance, and ability—will be one of “uncomfortable roommates” until June. But when Mr. Kermit unexpectedly stands up for a student, the kids of SCS-8 notice his sense of “justice and fairness.” Mr. Kermit finds he may even care a little about them, and they start to care back in their own way, turning a corner and bringing along a few ghosts from Mr. Kermit’s past. Writing in the alternating voices of Mr. Kermit, most of his students, and two administrators, Korman spins a narrative of redemption and belief in exceeding self-expectations. Naming conventions indicate characters of different ethnic backgrounds, but the book subscribes to a white default. The two students who do not narrate may be students of color, and their characterizations subtly—though arguably inadequately—demonstrate the danger of preconceptions.
Funny and endearing, though incomplete characterizations provoke questions. (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-06-256388-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Balzer + Bray/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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