A moving but never overwhelming look at Japan’s devastating 2011 earthquake.
When Japan is left in ruins by a massive earthquake, one child must navigate through fear to help the community.
Maya, half Japanese, half American, lives in a suburb a few miles outside of Tokyo. On March 11, 2011, a five-minute-long earthquake shudders through Japan, changing their lives forever. Aftershocks and tsunamis threaten to cause more devastation every moment. Maya’s family discovers they are luckier than many; they still have their home and their lives. But with each new tremble, Maya can’t help but panic. As whole areas are wiped out by the ocean, a nuclear plant is damaged, and the death toll continues to rise, the rest of Japan bands together to send relief to the hardest-hit region, in the northeast. Maya continues to feel hopeless and afraid, but her father tells her, “strengthen yourself,” then help others. Through small acts of kindness, Maya finds strength and discovers even little things can make a big difference. Narrated by Maya in free verse, this is an affecting account of Japan’s catastrophic earthquake and the days that surrounded it. The time signature often appears in red in the margins, allowing readers to grasp how long each day felt and how frequent and unpredictable aftershocks were. Occasionally shaky typesetting, along with the changing size and movement of the words on the page, adds to the overall impact and gravity of the story.
A moving but never overwhelming look at Japan’s devastating 2011 earthquake. (author’s note) (Historical fiction. 8-12)Pub Date: June 30, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-4814-3789-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Caitlyn Dlouhy/Atheneum
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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
During a school year in which a gifted teacher who emphasizes personal responsibility among his fifth graders ends up in a coma from a thrown snowball, his students come to terms with their own issues and learn to be forgiving. Told in short chapters organized month-by-month in the voices of seven students, often describing the same incident from different viewpoints, this weaves together a variety of not-uncommon classroom characters and situations: the new kid, the trickster, the social bully, the super-bright and the disaffected; family clashes, divorce and death; an unwed mother whose long-ago actions haven't been forgotten in the small-town setting; class and experiential differences. Mr. Terupt engineers regular visits to the school’s special-needs classroom, changing some lives on both sides. A "Dollar Word" activity so appeals to Luke that he sprinkles them throughout his narrative all year. Danielle includes her regular prayers, and Anna never stops her hopeful matchmaking. No one is perfect in this feel-good story, but everyone benefits, including sentimentally inclined readers. (Fiction. 9-12)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-385-73882-8
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: Sept. 1, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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