A hilarious Asian-American heroine guaranteed to provoke laughs—not anxiety.
Abbie Wu, Chinese-American preteen and worrywart, is doomed.
She’s about to start Pointdexter Middle School, and “nothing good ever happens in the Middles.” Added to her doom is a family who doesn’t get her. Baby sister Clara is annoyingly cute. Big brother Peter is a legend for being good at everything. And Mom never worries about anything, while Abbie seems to have written the textbook on anxiety. At school, Abbie figures at least lunch will be an improvement, with “REAL food,” but instead, she comes face to face with the injustice of the eighth-grade–only lunch line. Worse, she must choose an elective, and her nerves explode because choosing one feels like declaring her Thing, which she does not have, unlike her best friends, Maxine and Logan, who sign up for drama and coding respectively and without any doubts. With no elective chosen, Abbie is assigned to study hall, a place with suck-ups, slackers, troublemakers, and loners. And the fun begins. Debut author Vivat writes and illustrates a funny, neurotic, and delightful girl with a heart as big as her worries. The extensively illustrated novel packs a punch with fresh, lively pencil-and-ink drawings and lettering that set each mood perfectly. The multicultural cast of characters, including kooky Aunt Lisa and scary Ms. Skelter, turns up the charm and humor scale.
A hilarious Asian-American heroine guaranteed to provoke laughs—not anxiety. (Fiction. 8-13)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-239879-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this...
Sentenced to a brutal juvenile detention camp for a crime he didn't commit, a wimpy teenager turns four generations of bad family luck around in this sunburnt tale of courage, obsession, and buried treasure from Sachar (Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger, 1995, etc.).
Driven mad by the murder of her black beau, a schoolteacher turns on the once-friendly, verdant town of Green Lake, Texas, becomes feared bandit Kissin' Kate Barlow, and dies, laughing, without revealing where she buried her stash. A century of rainless years later, lake and town are memories—but, with the involuntary help of gangs of juvenile offenders, the last descendant of the last residents is still digging. Enter Stanley Yelnats IV, great-grandson of one of Kissin' Kate's victims and the latest to fall to the family curse of being in the wrong place at the wrong time; under the direction of The Warden, a woman with rattlesnake venom polish on her long nails, Stanley and each of his fellow inmates dig a hole a day in the rock-hard lake bed. Weeks of punishing labor later, Stanley digs up a clue, but is canny enough to conceal the information of which hole it came from. Through flashbacks, Sachar weaves a complex net of hidden relationships and well-timed revelations as he puts his slightly larger-than-life characters under a sun so punishing that readers will be reaching for water bottles.
Good Guys and Bad get just deserts in the end, and Stanley gets plenty of opportunities to display pluck and valor in this rugged, engrossing adventure. (Fiction. 9-13)Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 978-0-374-33265-5
Page Count: 233
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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