Smart, lively, and genuine, Clara Humble will feel familiar to anyone who has ever ignored that worried feeling in the pit...
Clara Humble (who is not so humble) gets to show off her stuff on television when her favorite show, Smarty Pants, comes to town!
The only trouble is that she’s competing with lots of her friends, including her best friend, Bradley. And to make matters worse, the age-old battle between the girls and the boys erupts into a full-blown war, both on the playground and on the set. When she and Bradley find themselves in opposition on the gender issue, Clara worries that her best friend has gone to the dark side. Will the two of them be able to keep their friendship despite the stress of competition? And how far will Clara go to prove that she’s the best at answering trivia questions while wallowing around in vats of pudding? Humphrey’s second Clara Humble book delivers another exciting adventure featuring a group of characters who feel pleasingly authentic and who find themselves in tricky situations that require sharper-than-usual creative thinking skills. (Naming conventions point to some diversity among Clara’s classmates, but Clara and Bradley appear to be white.) Paired with Clara’s comic-strip drawings featuring @Cat, superheroine extraordinaire, the lively narrative and cunning plot points provide a nifty adventure and an exploration of the consequences of going with the crowd.
Smart, lively, and genuine, Clara Humble will feel familiar to anyone who has ever ignored that worried feeling in the pit of their stomach . (Fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-77147-215-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Owlkids Books
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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